Explore Quotes by Annie Dillard

I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again.

I can't dance anymore. Total knee replacements. I can't do anything anymore.

How can people think that artists seek a name? A name, like a face, is something you have when you're not alone. There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world, lit or unlit as the light allows.

God gave me a talent to draw. I 'owed' it to him to develop the talent.

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.

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

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

You can't test courage cautiously.

There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by.

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

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.

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.

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.

Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.

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.

There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.

Buddhism notes that it is always a mistake to think your soul can go it alone.

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

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.

The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.