Quote

If we listened to our intellect, we’d never have a love affair... or go into business. You’ve got to jump off cliffs and build your wings on the way down.

Annie Dillard

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Annie Dillard
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: April 30
Author
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Pittsburg
Pennsylvania
Annie Dillard Doak
Build
Business
Way
Cliffs
Never
Listened
Love
Jump
Affair
Intellect
Wings

More quotes by Annie Dillard

Image
The real and proper question is: why is it beautiful?
Annie Dillard
Image
Experiencing the present purely is being empty and hollow you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.
Annie Dillard
Image
Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.
Annie Dillard
Image
I'm a housewife: I spend far more time on housework than anything else.
Annie Dillard
Image
Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?
Annie Dillard
Image
I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.
Annie Dillard
Image
The soul may ask God for anything, and never fail.
Annie Dillard
Image
Having chosen this foolishness, I was a free being. How could the world ever stop me, how could I betray myself, if I was not afraid?
Annie Dillard
Image
For all the insularity of the old guard, Pittsburgh was always an open and democratic town.
Annie Dillard
Image
Then why did you tell me?
Annie Dillard
Image
Nature seems to exult in abounding radicality, extremism, anarchy. If we were to judge nature by its common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed. In nature, improbabilities are the one stock in trade. The whole creation is one lunatic fringe. ... No claims of any and all revelations could be so far-fetched as a single giraffe.
Annie Dillard
Image
The way you live your days is the way you live your life.
Annie Dillard
Image
The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.
Annie Dillard
Image
It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale.
Annie Dillard
Image
Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?
Annie Dillard
Image
I cannot cause light the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam.
Annie Dillard
Image
I am a fugitive and a vagabond, a sojourner seeking signs.
Annie Dillard
Image
God gave me a talent to draw. I 'owed' it to him to develop the talent.
Annie Dillard
Image
Unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous.
Annie Dillard
Image
You can serve or you can sing, and wreck your heart in prayer, working the world's hard work.
Annie Dillard