Time Quotes by Annie Dillard

“I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was…

— Annie Dillard

I'm a housewife: I spend far more time on housework than anything else.

— Annie Dillard

Landscape consists in the multiple, overlapping intricacies and forms that exist in a given space at a moment in time.

— Annie Dillard

What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.

— Annie Dillard

Experiencing the present purely is being empty and hollow; you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.

— Annie Dillard

I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.

— Annie Dillard

Every day is a god, each day is a god, and holiness holds forth in time.

— Annie Dillard

Writers serve as the memory of a people. They chew over our public past.

— Annie Dillard

You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it to the page. The…

— Annie Dillard

“Do women in love feel as men do? Do men love as women love? His virgin bride shared her pipe-frame bed all…

— Annie Dillard

There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and…

— Annie Dillard

“One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right…

— Annie Dillard

You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it... The vision is not…

— Annie Dillard

No, the point is not only does time fly and do we die, but that in these reckless conditions we live at…

— Annie Dillard

When I walk with a camera, I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I walk…

— Annie Dillard

Time is the continuous loop, the snakeskin with scales endlessly overlapping without beginning or end, or time is an ascending spiral if…

— Annie Dillard

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one,…

— Annie Dillard

“Goethe’s Faust risks all if he should cry to the moment, the 'augenblick', “Verweile doch!” “Last forever!” Who hasn’t prayed that prayer?…

— Annie Dillard

Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That…

— Annie Dillard

Noticing and remembering everything would trap bright scenes to light and fill the blank and darkening past which was already piling up…

— Annie Dillard

“And we the people are so vulnerable. Our bodies are shot with mortality. Our legs are fear and our arms are time.…

— Annie Dillard

“What do we ever know that is higher than that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and reveals us…

— Annie Dillard

Hasidism has a tradition that one of man's purposes is to assist God in the work of redemption by "hallowing" the things…

— Annie Dillard

We sleep to time's hurdy-gurdy; we wake, if ever we wake, to the silence of God. And then, when we wake to…

— Annie Dillard

“I am sitting under a sycamore by Tinker Creek. I am really here, alive on the intricate earth under trees. But under…

— Annie Dillard

“I saw to the south a man walking. He was breaking ground in perfect silence. He wore a harness and pulled a…

— Annie Dillard

“I'm in the market for some present tense; I'm on the lookout, shopping around, more so every year. It's a seller's market—do…

— Annie Dillard

“At the time of Lewis and Clark, setting the prairies on fire was a well-known signal that meant, ‘Come down to the…

— Annie Dillard

“There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and…

— Annie Dillard

“What does it feel like to be alive? Living, you stand under a waterfall. You leave the sleeping shore deliberately; you shed…

— Annie Dillard

“Evidently, a given object took no particular amount of time to draw; instead the artist took the time, or didn’t take it,…

— Annie Dillard

“What I call innocence is the spirit’s unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once…

— Annie Dillard

“Last year I had a very unusual experience. I was awake, with my eyes closed, when I had a dream. It was…

— Annie Dillard

“Is it not late? A late time to be living? Are not our generations the crucial ones? For we have changed the…

— Annie Dillard

“Say you could view a time lapse film of our planet: what would you see? Transparent images moving through light, “an infinite…

— Annie Dillard

It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.

— Annie Dillard

“This hospital, like every other, is a hole in the universe through which holiness issues in blasts. It blows both ways, in…

— Annie Dillard

You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you hear it: There is nothing there...You feel the world's word as a…

— Annie Dillard

Love so sprang at her, she honestly thought no one had ever looked into it. Where was it in literature? Someone would…

— Annie Dillard

Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation's short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air,…

— Annie Dillard