Top 326 Quotes & Sayings by Annie Dillard - Page 6

Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.

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.

In literary history, generation follows generation in a rage.

I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too.

Admire the world for never ending on you -- as you would an opponent, without taking your eyes away from him, or walking away.

I write in my own journal when something extraordinary or funny happens. And there's some nice imagery in there. I don't think of what to do with it.

Don't save something good for a later place. Don't hold back from your students, from the poor, don't try to keep anything for yourself 'cause it'll turn to ashes.

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

I had good innings, as the British say. I wrote for 38 years at the top of my form, and I wanted to quit on a high note.

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

A shepherd on a hilltop who looks at a mess of stars and thinks, ‘There’s a hunter, a plow, a fish,’ is making mental connections that have as much real force in the universe as the very fires in those stars themselves.

What I call innocence is the spirit's unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once a receptiveness and total concentration.

You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it... The vision is not so much destroyed, exactly, as it is, by the time you have finished, forgotten. It has been replaced by this changeling.

What I sought in books was imagination. It was depth, depth of thought and feeling; some sort of extreme of subject matter; some nearness to death; some call to courage. I myself was getting wild; I wanted wildness, originality, genius, rapture, hope. ... What I sought in books was a world whose surfaces, whose people and events and days lived, actually matched the exaltation of the interior life. There you could live.

The creative process obtains in all creative acts. So if I'm painting suddenly I'll see something that I didn't see before.

Almost all of my many passionate interests, and my many changes of mind, came through books. Books prompted the many vows I made to myself.

I had been chipping at the world idly, and had by accident uncovered vast and labyrinthine further worlds within it.

Having chosen this foolishness, I was a free being. How could the world ever stop me, how could I betray myself, if I was not afraid?

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

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

Old memories are very easy to get except that once you write about something you've destroyed it.

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.

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

By dipping us children in the Bible so often, they hoped, I think, to give our lives a serious tint, and to provide us with quaintly magnificent snatches of prayer to produce as charms while, say, being mugged for our cash or jewels.

Write as if you are dying.

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