Quotes from Annie Dillard

I'd seen a great many partial eclipses, but a partial eclipse has the same relation to a total eclipse as flirting with a man does to marrying him. It's completely different.

Nothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves.

As a life's work, I would remember everything - everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net.

Our family was on the lunatic fringe. My mother was always completely irrepressible. My father made crowd noises into a microphone.

Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.

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.

The Pulitzer is more useful than meaningful.

I work mornings only. I go out to lunch. Afternoons I play with the baby, walk with my husband, or shovel mail.

No one can help you if you're stuck in a work. Only you can figure a way out, because only you can see the work's possibilities.

The notion of the infinite variety of detail and the multiplicity of forms is a pleasing one; in complexity are the fringes of beauty, and in variety are generosity and exuberance.

The writer studies literature, not the world.

The writer studies literature, not the world. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write.

A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.

The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.

We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us.

Just think: in all the clean, beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a blot; our planet alone has death.

Write as if you were dying.

There is no such thing as an artist - only the world, lit or unlit, as the world allows.

Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the surface of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what's going on here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise.

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?"

The surest sign of age is loneliness.