Quote

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

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
Water
Mention
Lives
Waters
Live
Sleeping
Never
Waking
Life
Useless
Private
Insensible
Sleep
Recall
Half
Recalls

More quotes by 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
About five years ago I saw a mockingbird make a straight vertical descent from the roof gutter of a four-story building. It was an act as careless and spontaneous as the curl of a stem or the kindling of a star.
Annie Dillard
Image
What is a house but a bigger skin, and a neighborhood map but the world's skin ever expanding?
Annie Dillard
Image
No child on earth was ever meant to be ordinary, and you can see it in them, and they know it, too, but then the times get to them, and the wear out their brains learning what folks expect, and spend their strength trying to rise over those same folks.
Annie Dillard
Image
Divinity is not playful. The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensibl e earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and fleet. There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see.
Annie Dillard
Image
Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.
Annie Dillard
Image
The painter... does not fit the paints to the world. He most certainly does not fit the world to himself. He fits himself to the paint. The self is the servant who bears the paintbox and its inherited contents.
Annie Dillard
Image
I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you.
Annie Dillard
Image
In literary history, generation follows generation in a rage.
Annie Dillard
Image
What is important is the moment of opening a life and feeling it touch--with an electric hiss and cry--this speckled mineral sphere, our present world.
Annie Dillard
Image
Caring passionately about something isn't against nature, and it isn't against human nature. It's what we're here to do.
Annie Dillard
Image
We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up. We teach our children to look alive there, to join by words and activities the life of human culture on the planet
Annie Dillard
Image
People who take photographs during their whole vacation won't remember their vacation. They'll only remember what photographs they took.
Annie Dillard
Image
Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we sense them.
Annie Dillard
Image
What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.
Annie Dillard
Image
Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.
Annie Dillard
Image
On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away.
Annie Dillard
Image
Make connections let rip and dance where you can.
Annie Dillard
Image
Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.
Annie Dillard
Image
If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed.
Annie Dillard