Quote

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

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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
Common
Stock
Giraffe
Sense
Judge
Extremism
Nature
Claims
Likelihood
Seems
Judging
Fringe
Whole
Trade
Lunatic
Exult
Believe
Wouldn
Anarchy
Abounding
World
Creation
Existed
Fetched
Single
Revelations
Improbability

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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Every day is a god, each day is a god, and holiness holds forth in time.
Annie Dillard
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There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by.
Annie Dillard
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Writing a book is like rearing children -- willpower has very little to do with it. If you have a little baby crying in the middle of the night, and if you depend only on willpower to get you out of bed to feed the baby, that baby will starve. You do it out of love.
Annie Dillard
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You can't test courage cautiously, so I ran hard and waved my arms hard, happy.
Annie Dillard
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The dear, stupid body is as easily satisfied as a spaniel.
Annie Dillard
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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
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Time is the warp and matter the weft of the woven texture of beauty in space, and death is the hurling shuttle.
Annie Dillard
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Put yourself out of your misery.
Annie Dillard
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The surest sign of age is loneliness.
Annie Dillard
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The courage of children and beasts is a function of innocence.
Annie Dillard
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You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you hear it: There is nothing there...You feel the world's word as a tension, a hum, a single chorused note everywhere the same. This is it: This hum is the silence.
Annie Dillard
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When I teach, I preach. I thump the Bible. I exhort my students morally. I talk to them about the dedicated life.
Annie Dillard
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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
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I feel as though I stand at the foot of an infinitely high staircase, down which some exuberant spirit is flinging tennis ball after tennis ball, eternally, and the one thing I want in the world is a tennis ball.
Annie Dillard
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I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers.
Annie Dillard
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Just think: in all the clean, beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a blot our planet alone has death.
Annie Dillard
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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
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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
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A schedule defends from chaos and whim. A net for catching days.
Annie Dillard
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I alternate between thinking of the planet as home - dear and familiar stone hearth and garden - and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners.
Annie Dillard