Annie Dillard Quotes - Page 13

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You do what you do out of your private love of the thing itself.

You do what you do out of your private love of the thing itself.

Annie Dillard

Let the grass die. I let almost all of my indoor plants die from neglect while I was writing the book. There are all kinds of ways to live. You can take your choice. You can keep a tidy house, and when St. Peter asks you what you did with your life, you can say, I kept a tidy house, I made my own cheese balls.

Annie Dillard

Book, Writing, House

Fiction keeps its audience by retaining the world as its subject matter. People like the world. Many people actually prefer it to art and spend their days by choice in the thick of it.

Annie Dillard

Art, People, Choices

Annie Dillard (1983). “Living by Fiction”, New York : Harper & Row

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

Annie Dillard

Each Day, Holiness

Annie Dillard (2016). “Holy the Firm”, p.6, Canongate Books

For all the insularity of the old guard, Pittsburgh was always an open and democratic town.

Annie Dillard

Cities, Pittsburgh, Towns

Annie Dillard (2016). “An American Childhood”, p.69, Canongate Books

The world did not have me in mind; it had no mind. It was a coincidental collection of things and people, of items, an I myself was one such item...the things in the world did not necessarily cause my overwhelming feelings; the feelings were inside me, beneath my skin, behind my ribs, withing my skull. They were even, to some extent, under my control.

Annie Dillard

Skulls, People, Feelings

The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring. It is the sensation of a stunt pilot's turning barrel rolls, or an inchworm's blind rearing from a stem in search of a route. At its worst, it feels like alligator wrestling, at the level of the sentence.

Annie Dillard

Book, Wrestling, Writing

No one can help you if you're stuck in a work. Only you can figure a way out, because only you can see the work's possibilities.

Annie Dillard

Way, Helping, Possibility

Dan Gerber is one of our finest living poets.

Annie Dillard

Poet, Finest

If I actually believed that the progress of human understanding depended on our crop of contemporary novelists, I would shoot myself.

Annie Dillard

Understanding, Progress, Novelists

Annie Dillard (1983). “Living by Fiction”, New York : Harper & Row

About five years ago I saw a mockingbird make a straight vertical descent from the roof gutter of a four-story building. It was an act as careless and spontaneous as the curl of a stem or the kindling of a star.

Annie Dillard

Stars, Years, Curls

Annie Dillard (2016). “The Abundance”, p.104, Canongate Books

Time is the continuous loop, the snakeskin with scales endlessly overlapping without beginning or end, or time is an ascending spiral if you will, like a child's toy Slinky.

Annie Dillard

Time, Children, Ascending

Annie Dillard (2011). “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek”, p.77, Hymns Ancient and Modern Ltd