Quotes from Annie Dillard

She burned for two hours without changing, without bending or leaning—only glowing within, like a building fire glimpsed through silhouetted walls, like a hollow saint, like a flame faced virgin gone to God, while I read by her light, kindled, while Rimbaud in Paris burned out his brains in a thousand poems, while night pooled wetly at my feet.

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 woke at intervals until, by that September when Father went down the river, the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not. 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.

Every woman stayed alone in her house in those days, like a coin in a safe. Amy and I lived alone with our mother most of the day. Amy was three years younger than I. Mother and Amy and I went our separate ways in peace.

The mind fits the world and shapes it as a river fits and shapes its own banks.

A mind risks real ignorance for the sometimes paltry prize of an imagination enriched. The trick of reason is to get the imagination to seize the actual world—if only from time to time.

Beauty itself is the fruit of the creator's exuberance....

I think that the dying pray at the last not please, but thank you, as a guest thanks his host at the door. Falling from airplanes the people are crying thank you, thank you, all the way down the air; and the cold carriages draw up for them on the rocks.

The girl went through the experience that we all go through and forget, the moment we are born. She saw, but it did not mean anything but a lot of different kinds of brightness.

I WALKED. My mother had given me the freedom of the streets as soon as I could say our telephone number. I walked and memorized the neighborhood. I made a mental map and located myself upon it. At night in bed I rehearsed the small world's scheme and set challenges: Find the store using backyards only. Imagine a route from the school to my friend's house. I mastered chunks of town in one direction only; I ignored the other direction

In fact, even Aquinas dissolved the fatal problem of natural, physical evil by tinkering with God's omnipotence. As Baron von Hugel noted, Aquinas said that the Divine Omnipotence must not be taken as the power to effect any imaginable thing, but only to effect what is within the nature of things.

From even the deepest slumber you wake with a jolt - older, closer to death, and wise, grateful for breath.

As much as anyone, I imagine, he went on, I live in the shadows of faith - that is, in doubt. Doubt and dedication often go hand in hand. And faith, crucially, is not assenting intellectually to a series of doctrinal propositions; it is living in conscious and rededicated relationship to God. Nevertheless, the temptation to profess creeds with uncrossed fingers is strong.

Friendship is no doubt the highest form of love and also very difficult.

Freedom is the world's water and weather, the world's nourishment freely given, its soil and sap: and the creator loves pizzazz.

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

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.

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

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

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.

If we listened to our intellect, we'd never have a love affair... or go into business. You've got to jump off cliffs and build your wings on the way down.

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.

Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?

There is no whit less enlightenment under the tree by your street than there was under the Buddha's bo tree. I invite you to go sit under that tree by your street.