Annie Dillard Quotes - Page 8

Does anything eat flowers. I couldn't recall having seen anything eat a flower - are they nature's privileged pets?

The irrational haunts the metaphysical.

I never met a man who was shaken by a field of identical blades of grass. An acre of poppies and a forest of spruce boggle no one's mind.

The surest sign of age is loneliness.

People who read are not too lazy to turn on the television; they prefer books.

Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we sense them.

Put yourself out of your misery.

It is the fixed that horrifies us, the fixed that assails us with the tremendous force of mindlessness. The fixed is a Mason jar,and we can't beat it open. ...The fixed is a world without fire--dead flint, dead tinder, and nowhere a spark. It is motion without direction, force without power, the aimless procession of caterpillars round the rim of a vase, and I hate it because at any moment I myself might step to that charmed and glistening thread.

The painter... does not fit the paints to the world. He most certainly does not fit the world to himself. He fits himself to the paint. The self is the servant who bears the paintbox and its inherited contents.

Doing something does not require discipline. It creates its own discipline - with a little help from caffeine.

The novel is a game or joke shared between author and reader.

Those of us who read carried around with us like martyrs a secret knowledge, a secret joy, and a secret hope: There is a life worth living where history is still taking place; there are ideas worth dying for, and circumstances where courage is still prized.

As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.

Unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous.

It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave. It is hard to desecrate a grove and change your mind. The very holy mountains are keeping mum. We doused the burning bush and cannot rekindle it; we are lighting matches in vain under every green tree.

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

It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave.

It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale.

Love so sprang at her, she honestly thought no one had ever looked into it. Where was it in literature? Someone would have written something. She must not have recognized it. Time to read everything again.

The soul may ask God for anything, and never fail.

Could two live that way? Could two live under the wild rose, and explore by the pond, so that the smooth mind of each is as everywhere present to the other, and as received and as unchallenged, as falling snow?

Young children have no sense of wonder. They bewilder well, but few things surprise them. All of it is new to young children, after all, and equally gratuitous.

The creatures I seek do not want to be seen.

Private life, book life, took place where words met imagination without passing through the world.

The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring.