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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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Annie Dillard
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: April 30
Author
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Pittsburg
Pennsylvania
Annie Dillard Doak
Time
Shuttle
Warp
Woven
Texture
Beauty
Space
Death
Matter
Hurling

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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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
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What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.
Annie Dillard
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We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence.
Annie Dillard
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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
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We are here on the planet only once, and might as well get a feel for the place.
Annie Dillard
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It could be that our faithlessness is a cowering cowardice born of our very smallness, a massive failure of imagination... If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldnt believe the world existed.
Annie Dillard
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If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed.
Annie Dillard
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There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been.
Annie Dillard
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Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
Annie Dillard
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Fiction keeps its audience by retaining the world as its subject matter. People like the world. Many people actually prefer it to art and spend their days by choice in the thick of it.
Annie Dillard
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As a life's work, I would remember everything - everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net.
Annie Dillard
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No one can help you if you're stuck in a work. Only you can figure a way out, because only you can see the work's possibilities.
Annie Dillard
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Divinity is not playful. The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensibl e earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and fleet. There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see.
Annie Dillard
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You can't test courage cautiously.
Annie Dillard
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Cruelty is a mystery, and a waste of pain.
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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The more you read, the more you will write. The better the stuff you read, the better the stuff you will write.
Annie Dillard
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Experiencing the present purely is being empty and hollow you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.
Annie Dillard
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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
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The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.
Annie Dillard