Quote

Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.

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
Ill
Art
Labrador
Like
Retriever
Retrievers
Drags
Traffic
Trained
Drag

More quotes by Annie Dillard

Image
I woke at intervals until . . . the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not.
Annie Dillard
Image
Crystals grew inside rock like arithmetic flowers. They lengthened and spread, added plane to plane in an awed and perfect obedience to an absolute geometry that even stones - maybe only the stones - understood.
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
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
I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.
Annie Dillard
Image
These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.
Annie Dillard
Image
The mind itself is an art object. It is a Mondrian canvas onto whose homemade grids it fits its own preselected products. Our knowledge is contextual and only contextual. Ordering and invention coincide: we call their collaboration knowledge.
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
Nature's silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block.
Annie Dillard
Image
It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave.
Annie Dillard
Image
The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest.
Annie Dillard
Image
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
Image
The interior life is often stupid.
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
Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.
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
I'm a housewife: I spend far more time on housework than anything else.
Annie Dillard
Image
What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
Annie Dillard
Image
Silence is not our heritage but our destiny we live where we want to live.
Annie Dillard