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I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too.
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
World
Aging
Fallen
Eating
Along
Share
Nibbled
Getting
Frayed
Age
Eaten
Done
Survivor
More quotes by Annie Dillard
The world is wider in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain and Lazarus.
Annie Dillard
It should surprise no one that the life of the writer - such as it is - is colorless to the point of sensory deprivation. Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.
Annie Dillard
Landscape consists in the multiple, overlapping intricacies and forms that exist in a given space at a moment in time.
Annie Dillard
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
The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.
Annie Dillard
Who and of what import were the men whose bones bulk the Great Wall, the thirty million Mao starved, or the thirty million children not yet five who die each year now? Why, they are the insignificant others, of course living or dead, they are just some of the plentiful others...And you? To what end were we billions of oddballs born?
Annie Dillard
It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.
Annie Dillard
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
I know only enough of God to want to worship him, by any means ready to hand.
Annie Dillard
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
Don't save something good for a later place. Don't hold back from your students, from the poor, don't try to keep anything for yourself 'cause it'll turn to ashes.
Annie Dillard
I wake expectant, hoping to see a new thing.
Annie Dillard
I had been chipping at the world idly, and had by accident uncovered vast and labyrinthine further worlds within it.
Annie Dillard
Whenever there is stillness there is the still small voice, God's speaking from the whirlwind, nature's old song, and dance.
Annie Dillard
The real and proper question is: why is it beautiful?
Annie Dillard
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
When you write, you lay out a line of words. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory.
Annie Dillard
The mind itself is an art object ... The mind is a blue guitar on which we improvise the song of the world.
Annie Dillard
Let the grass die. I let almost all of my indoor plants die from neglect while I was writing the book. There are all kinds of ways to live. You can take your choice. You can keep a tidy house, and when St. Peter asks you what you did with your life, you can say, I kept a tidy house, I made my own cheese balls.
Annie Dillard
Your freedom as a writer is not freedom of expression in the sense of wild blurting you may not let rip. It is life at its most free, if you are fortunate enough to be able to try it, because you select your materials, invent your task, and pace yourself.
Annie Dillard
