Quotes from Annie Dillard

The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring.

There are no events but thoughts and the heart's hard turning, the heart's slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times.

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

When I first read the words 'introvert' and 'extrovert' when I was 10, I thought I was both.

Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me. This is easy to write, easy to read, and hard to believe.

You do what you do out of your private love of the thing itself.

I wake up thinking: What am I reading? What will I read next? I'm terrified that I'll run out, that I will read through all I want to, and be forced to learn wildflowers at last, to keep awake.

I worked so hard all my life, and all I want to do now is read.

I know only enough of God to want to worship him, by any means ready to hand.

The creatures I seek do not want to be seen.

The mind wants the world to return its love, or its awareness; the mind wants to know all the world, and all eternity, and God.

Silence is not our heritage but our destiny; we live where we want to live.

Somewhere, and I can't find where, I read about an Eskimo hunter who 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 Eskimo earnestly, 'did you tell me?'

The dedicated life is the life worth living.

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.

Matters of taste are not, it turns out, moral issues.

Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.

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

In literary history, generation follows generation in a rage.

There must be bands of enthusiasts for everything on earth-fanatics who shared a vocabulary, a batch of technical skills and equipment, and, perhaps, a vision of some single slice of the beauty and mystery of things, of their complexity, fascination, and unexpectedness.

'Fecundity' is an ugly word for an ugly subject. It is ugly, at least, in the eggy animal world. I don't think it is for plants.

How can people think that artists seek a name? There is no such thing as an artist - only the world, lit or unlit, as the world allows.

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.

An Eskimo shaman said, Life's greatest danger lies in the fact that man's food consists entirely of souls.