All Annie Dillard Quotes
- Take a quick dip, relax with a schnapps and a sandwich, stretch out, have a smoke, take a nap or just rest, and then sit… Appearance
- I couldn't unpeach the peaches. Funny
- Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles. Book
- I have since only rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it,… Crack
- I had hopes for my rough edges. I wanted to use them as a can opener, to cut myself a hole in the world's surface… Cut
- Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff. Broadside
- To crank myself up I stood on a jack and ran myself up. I tightened myself like a bolt. I inserted myself in a vise-clamp… Anesthesiologist
- What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality? Dying
- But enough is enough. One turns at last even from glory itself with a sigh of relief. From the depths of mystery, and even from… Bounce
- 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… Believe
- I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers. Air
- It's a little silly to finally learn how to write at this age. But I long ago realized I was secretly sincere. Age
- Are you living just a little and calling that life? Calling
- Writers serve as the memory of a people. They chew over our public past. Chew
- The morning woods were utterly new. A strong yellow light pooled beneath the trees; my shadow appeared and vanished on the path, since a third… Appeared
- Peeping through my keyhold I see within the range of only about 30 percent of the light that comes from the sun; the rest is… Animal
- You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then-and only then-it is handed to you. Brain
- We wake, if ever at all, to mystery. All
- We are here on the planet only once, and might as well get a feel for the place. Feel
- A shepherd on a hilltop who looks at a mess of stars and thinks, ‘There’s a hunter, a plow, a fish,’ is making mental connections… Connections
- We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all. All
- 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… Divinity
- Trees have a curious relationship to the subject of the present moment. There are many created things in the universe that outlive us, that outlive… Created
- The way you live your days is the way you live your life. Days
- Even if things are as bad as they could possible be, and as meaningless, then matters of truth are themselves indifferent; we may as well… Bad