Annie Dillard Quotes

265 quotes in 3408 categories

• If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed.
• Experiencing the present purely is being empty and hollow; you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.
• We are here to witness the creation and to abet it. We are here to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed. Together we…
• You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you hear it: There is nothing there...You feel the world's word as a tension, a hum,…
• The way we live our days, is the way we live our lives.
• I wake expectant, hoping to see a new thing.
• I think the dying pray at the last not "please," but "thank you," as a guest thanks his host at the door.
• I think that the dying pray at the last not please but thank you, as a guest thanks his host at the door. Falling from…
• Learn punctuation; it is your little drum set, one of the few tools oyu have to signal the reader where the beats and emphases go.…
• Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?
• The more you read, the more you will write. The better the stuff you read, the better the stuff you will write.
• When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner's pick, a wood carver's gouge, a surgeon's probe.…
• At night I read and write, and things I have never understood become clear; I reap the harvest of the rest of the year's planting
• Adverbs are a sign that you've used the wrong verb.
• Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don't affair. A fish flashes, then dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much salt. Deer…
• Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.
• No one escapes the wilderness on the way to the promised land.
• Nothing on earth is more gladdening than knowing we must roll up our sleeves and move back the boundaries of the humanly possible once more.
• Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it…
• We still and always want waking.

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