Annie Dillard Quotes - Page 11

In literary history, generation follows generation in a rage.

Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me. This is easy to write, easy to read, and hard to believe.

Books swept me away, this way and that, one after the other; I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them.

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

When you write, you lay out a line of words. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory.

Whenever an encounter between a writer of good will and a regular person of good will happens to touch on the subject of writing, each person discovers, dismayed, that good will is of no earthly use. The conversation cannot proceed.

Write as if you are dying.

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

The Pulitzer is more useful than meaningful.

A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.

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.

As a life's work, I would remember everything - everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net.

why did I have to keep learning this same thing over and over?

I wake up thinking: What am I reading? What will I read next? I'm terrified that I'll run out, that I will read through all I want to, and be forced to learn wildflowers at last, to keep awake.

If you're going to publish a book, you probably are going to make a fool of yourself.

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 the heights of splendor, we bounce back and hurry for the latitudes of home.

When I walk with a camera, I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment's light prints on my own silver gut. When I see this second way I am above all an unscrupulous observer.

The mind wants the world to return its love, or its awareness; the mind wants to know all the world, and all eternity, and God.

We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall.

Our life seems cursed to be a wiggle merely, and a wandering without end.

It's a little silly to finally learn how to write at this age. But I long ago realized I was secretly sincere.

The dear, stupid body is as easily satisfied as a spaniel.

What is important is the moment of opening a life and feeling it touch--with an electric hiss and cry--this speckled mineral sphere, our present world.

For writing a first draft requires from the writer a peculiar internal state which ordinary life does not induce. ... how to set yourself spinning?

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.