Quote

The irrational haunts the metaphysical.

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
Irrational
Haunts
Metaphysical

More quotes by Annie Dillard

Image
For all the insularity of the old guard, Pittsburgh was always an open and democratic town.
Annie Dillard
Image
Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.
Annie Dillard
Image
I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.
Annie Dillard
Image
The dear, stupid body is as easily satisfied as a spaniel.
Annie Dillard
Image
Geography is the key, the crucial accident of birth. A piece of protein could be a snail, a sea lion, or a systems analyst, but it had to start somewhere. This is not science it is merely metaphor. And the landscape in which the protein starts shapes its end as surely as bowls shape water.
Annie Dillard
Image
There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.
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
The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest.
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
What is a house but a bigger skin, and a neighborhood map but the world's skin ever expanding?
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
These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.
Annie Dillard
Image
The silence is all there is. It is the alpha and the omega, it is God's brooding over the face of the waters it is the blinded note of the ten thousand things, the whine of wings. You take a step in the right direction to pray to this silence, and even to address the prayer to World. Distinctions blur. Quit your tents. Pray without ceasing.
Annie Dillard
Image
We wake, if ever at all, to mystery.
Annie Dillard
Image
Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.
Annie Dillard
Image
I noticed this process of waking, and predicted with terrifying logic that one of these years not far away I would be awake continuously and never slip back, and never be free of myself again.
Annie Dillard
Image
By dipping us children in the Bible so often, they hoped, I think, to give our lives a serious tint, and to provide us with quaintly magnificent snatches of prayer to produce as charms while, say, being mugged for our cash or jewels.
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
Image
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
Image
The interior life is often stupid.
Annie Dillard