Quotes from Annie Dillard

The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less.

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

It should surprise no one that the life of the writer - such as it is - is colorless to the point of sensory deprivation. Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.

The way we live our days, is the way we live our lives.

Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?

The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.

I would like to live. . . open to time and death painlessly, noticing everything, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will.

Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you.

If you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days.

Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now.

An Inuit hunter asked the local missionary priest: "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" "No," said the priest, "not if you did not know." "Then why," asked the Inuit earnestly, "did you tell me?"

The surest sign of age is loneliness.

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

People love pretty much the same things best. A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.

Eskimo: 'If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?' Priest: 'No, not if you did not know.' Eskimo: 'Then why did you tell me?'

It's a little silly to finally learn how to write at this age. But I long ago realized I was secretly sincere.

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

A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.

A schedule defends from chaos and whim.

She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.

One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time...give it, give it all, give it now.

Like any child, I slid into myself perfectly fitted, as a diver meets her reflection in a pool. Her fingertips enter the fingertips on the water, her wrists slide up her arms. The diver wraps herself in her reflection wholly, sealing it at the toes, and wears it as she climbs rising from the pool, and ever after.

You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.

I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.