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We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall.

Annie Dillard

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Annie Dillard
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: April 30
Author
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Pittsburg
Pennsylvania
Annie Dillard Doak
Lives
Waters
Live
Sleeping
Never
Waking
Life
Useless
Private
Insensible
Sleep
Recall
Half
Recalls
Water
Mention

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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The more you read, the more you will write. The better the stuff you read, the better the stuff you will write.
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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.
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There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world lit or unlit as the light allows. When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it?
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Does anything eat flowers. I couldn't recall having seen anything eat a flower - are they nature's privileged pets?
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Just think: in all the clean, beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a blot our planet alone has death.
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I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.
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The Pulitzer is more useful than meaningful.
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Books swept me away, this way and that, one after the other I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them.
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There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been.
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These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.
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The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring.
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The life of sensation is the life of greed it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less.
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Landscape consists in the multiple, overlapping intricacies and forms that exist in a given space at a moment in time.
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Silence is not our heritage but our destiny we live where we want to live.
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Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.
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When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner's pick, a wood carver's gouge, a surgeon's probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year.
Annie Dillard
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It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.
Annie Dillard
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Geography is the key, the crucial accident of birth. A piece of protein could be a snail, a sea lion, or a systems analyst, but it had to start somewhere. This is not science it is merely metaphor. And the landscape in which the protein starts shapes its end as surely as bowls shape water.
Annie Dillard
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Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.
Annie Dillard
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The sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain. This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is.
Annie Dillard