Quote

Every spring he vowed to quit teaching school, and every summer he missed his pupils and searched for them on the streets.

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
Every
Missed
Quit
Quitting
Summer
Spring
Streets
Vowed
Teaching
Searched
School
Pupils

More quotes by Annie Dillard

Image
No one escapes the wilderness on the way to the promised land.
Annie Dillard
Image
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?
Annie Dillard
Image
I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers.
Annie Dillard
Image
But enough is enough. One turns at last even from glory itself with a sigh of relief. From the depths of mystery, and even from the heights of splendor, we bounce back and hurry for the latitudes of home.
Annie Dillard
Image
Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a word to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and delight, the canary that sings on the skull.
Annie Dillard
Image
Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.
Annie Dillard
Image
According to Inuit culture in Greenland, a person possesses six or seven souls. The souls take the form of tiny people scattered throughout the body.
Annie Dillard
Image
We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence.
Annie Dillard
Image
poetry has been able to function quite directly as human interpretation of the raw, loose universe. It is a mixture, if you will, of journalism and metaphysics, or of science and religion.
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 mind wants the world to return its love, or its awareness the mind wants to know all the world, and all eternity, and God.
Annie Dillard
Image
The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring.
Annie Dillard
Image
For writing a first draft requires from the writer a peculiar internal state which ordinary life does not induce. ... how to set yourself spinning?
Annie Dillard
Image
A schedule defends from chaos and whim. A net for catching days.
Annie Dillard
Image
Just once I wanted a task that required all the joy I had. Day after day I had noticed that if I waited long enough, my strong unexpressed joy would dwindle and dissipate inside me, like a fire subsiding . . . . Just this once I wanted to let it rip.
Annie Dillard
Image
You do what you do out of your private love of the thing itself.
Annie Dillard
Image
Writers serve as the memory of a people. They chew over our public past.
Annie Dillard
Image
I have since only rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam.
Annie Dillard
Image
I saw in a blue haze all the world poured flat and pale between the mountains
Annie Dillard
Image
The reader's ear must adjust down from loud life to the subtle, imaginary sounds of the written word. An ordinary reader picking up a book can't yet hear a thing it will take half an hour to pick up the writing's modulations, its ups and downs and louds and softs.
Annie Dillard