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Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we sense them.

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
Performed
Grace
Beauty
Whether
Sense

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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I woke at intervals until . . . the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not.
Annie Dillard
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It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping God may wake someday and take offense, or the waking God may draw us out to where we can never return.
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According to Inuit culture in Greenland, a person possesses six or seven souls. The souls take the form of tiny people scattered throughout the body.
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On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away.
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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.
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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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We wake, if ever at all, to mystery.
Annie Dillard
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The creatures I seek do not want to be seen.
Annie Dillard
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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
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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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if you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not.
Annie Dillard
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What I call innocence is the spirit's unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once a receptiveness and total concentration.
Annie Dillard
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Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand - that of finding workable compromises between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us.
Annie Dillard
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The novel is a game or joke shared between author and reader.
Annie Dillard
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I think the dying pray at the last not please, but thank you, as a guest thanks his host at the door.
Annie Dillard
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Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.
Annie Dillard
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The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper I cannot quite make it out.
Annie Dillard
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The way we live our days, is the way we live our lives.
Annie Dillard
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Push it. examine all things intensely and relentlessly.
Annie Dillard
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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