Quote

Don't save something good for a later place. Don't hold back from your students, from the poor, don't try to keep anything for yourself 'cause it'll turn to ashes.

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
Good
Turns
Ashes
Poor
Save
Keep
Later
Place
Students
Anything
Cause
Back
Hold
Trying
Turn
Something
Causes

More quotes by Annie Dillard

Image
When I teach, I preach. I thump the Bible. I exhort my students morally. I talk to them about the dedicated life.
Annie Dillard
Image
Our life seems cursed to be a wiggle merely, and a wandering without end.
Annie Dillard
Image
When I first read the words 'introvert' and 'extrovert' when I was 10, I thought I was both.
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
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
No, the point is not only does time fly and do we die, but that in these reckless conditions we live at all, and are vouchsafed, for the duration of certain inexplicable moments, to know it.
Annie Dillard
Image
You can't test courage cautiously.
Annie Dillard
Image
People who take photographs during their whole vacation won't remember their vacation. They'll only remember what photographs they took.
Annie Dillard
Image
Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation's short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit.
Annie Dillard
Image
Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.
Annie Dillard
Image
We are here on the planet only once, and might as well get a feel for the place.
Annie Dillard
Image
You can't test courage cautiously, so I ran hard and waved my arms hard, happy.
Annie Dillard
Image
We are here to witness. There is nothing else to do with those mute materials we do not need. Until Larry teaches his stone to talk, until God changes his mind, or until the pagan gods slip back to their hilltop groves, all we can do with the whole inhuman array is watch it.
Annie Dillard
Image
Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we sense them.
Annie Dillard
Image
Experiencing the present purely is being empty and hollow you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.
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
We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence.
Annie Dillard
Image
Who and of what import were the men whose bones bulk the Great Wall, the thirty million Mao starved, or the thirty million children not yet five who die each year now? Why, they are the insignificant others, of course living or dead, they are just some of the plentiful others...And you? To what end were we billions of oddballs born?
Annie Dillard
Image
You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it to the page. The page is jealous and tyrannical the page is made of time and matter the page always wins.
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