Quotes from Annie Dillard

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet.

We are here to abet creation and to witness to it, to notice each other's beautiful face and complex nature so that creation need not play to an empty house.

Whenever there is stillness there is the still small voice, God's speaking from the whirlwind, nature's old song, and dance.

If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed.

Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.

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

I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers.

I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as a dying friend. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.

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

We still and always want waking.

Nothing on earth is more gladdening than knowing we must roll up our sleeves and move back the boundaries of the humanly possible once more.

There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable.

You can serve or you can sing, and wreck your heart in prayer, working the world's hard work.

We wake, if ever at all, to mystery.

It makes more sense to write one big book - a novel or nonfiction narrative - than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all you possess and learn.

Then why did you tell me?

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

Experiencing the present purely is being empty and hollow; you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.

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