Quote

The mind itself is an art object ... The mind is a blue guitar on which we improvise the song of the world.

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
Art
Mind
World
Improvise
Object
Guitar
Blue
Objects
Song

More quotes by Annie Dillard

Image
The way we live our days, is the way we live our lives.
Annie Dillard
Image
You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then-and only then-it is handed to you.
Annie Dillard
Image
The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.
Annie Dillard
Image
Whenever an encounter between a writer of good will and a regular person of good will happens to touch on the subject of writing, each person discovers, dismayed, that good will is of no earthly use. The conversation cannot proceed.
Annie Dillard
Image
The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring.
Annie Dillard
Image
We are here to witness. There is nothing else to do with those mute materials we do not need. Until Larry teaches his stone to talk, until God changes his mind, or until the pagan gods slip back to their hilltop groves, all we can do with the whole inhuman array is watch it.
Annie Dillard
Image
It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave. It is hard to desecrate a grove and change your mind. The very holy mountains are keeping mum. We doused the burning bush and cannot rekindle it we are lighting matches in vain under every green tree.
Annie Dillard
Image
Write about winter in the summer. Describe Norway as Ibsen did, from a desk in Italy describe Dublin as James Joyce did, from a desk in Paris. Willa Cather wrote her prairie novels in New York City Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn in Hartford, Connecticut. Recently, scholars learned that Walt Whitman rarely left his room.
Annie Dillard
Image
It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.
Annie Dillard
Image
No one can help you if you're stuck in a work. Only you can figure a way out, because only you can see the work's possibilities.
Annie Dillard
Image
What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.
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
Young children have no sense of wonder. They bewilder well, but few things surprise them. All of it is new to young children, after all, and equally gratuitous.
Annie Dillard
Image
When you write, you lay out a line of words. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory.
Annie Dillard
Image
A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order - willed, faked, and so brought into being.
Annie Dillard
Image
The dear, stupid body is as easily satisfied as a spaniel.
Annie Dillard
Image
Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don't affair. A fish flashes, then dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much salt. Deer apparently ascend bodily into heaven the brightest oriole fades into leaves.
Annie Dillard
Image
As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.
Annie Dillard
Image
Landscape consists in the multiple, overlapping intricacies and forms that exist in a given space at a moment in time.
Annie Dillard
Image
I saw in a blue haze all the world poured flat and pale between the mountains
Annie Dillard