Quotes by Annie Dillard
The notion of the infinite variety of detail and the multiplicity of forms is a pleasing one; in complexity are the fringes of beauty, and in variety are generosity and exuberance.
There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by.
At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it.
Matters of taste are not, it turns out, moral issues.
I noticed this process of waking, and predicted with terrifying logic that one of these years not far away I would be awake continuously and never slip back, and never be free of myself again.
The mind of the writer does indeed do something before it dies, and so does its owner, but I would be hard put to call it living.
The writer studies literature, not the world.
If you're going to publish a book, you probably are going to make a fool of yourself.
I'm a housewife: I spend far more time on housework than anything else.
People love pretty much the same things best. A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.
Our family was on the lunatic fringe. My mother was always completely irrepressible. My father made crowd noises into a microphone.
God gave me a talent to draw. I 'owed' it to him to develop the talent.
When I first read the words 'introvert' and 'extrovert' when I was 10, I thought I was both.
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.
Crystals grew inside rock like arithmetic flowers. They lengthened and spread, added plane to plane in an awed and perfect obedience to an absolute geometry that even stones - maybe only the stones - understood.
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.
It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as separating us from our creator, our very self-consciousness, is also the one thing that divides us from our fellow creatures. It was a bitter birthday present from evolution.
Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.
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.
Eskimo: "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" Priest: "No, not if you did not know." Eskimo: "Then why did you tell me?"
Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you.
You can't test courage cautiously.
There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.
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 nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed.
As a life's work, I would remember everything - everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net.
