Quotes from Annie Dillard

I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again.

This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you.

People love the good not much less than the beautiful, and the happy as well, or even just the living, for the world of it all, and heart's home.

Society places the writer so far beyond the pale that society does not regard the writer at all.

One turns at last even from glory itself with a sigh of relief. From the depths of mystery, and even from the heights of splendor, we bounce back and hurry for the latitudes of home.

I could very calmly go wild.

It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave.

I have often noticed that these things, which obsess me, neither bother nor impress other people even slightly. I am horribly apt to approach some innocent at a gathering, and like the ancient mariner, fix him with a wild, glitt'ring eye and say, "Do you know that in the head of the caterpillar of the ordinary goat moth there are two hundred twenty-eight separate muscles?" The poor wretch flees. I am not making chatter; I mean to change his life.

The written word is weak. Many people prefer life to it. Life gets your blood going, and it smells good. Writing is mere writing, literature is mere.

Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.

We still & always want waking.

To dust is only to forestall burial

The interior life is often stupid. Its egoism blinds it and deafens it; its imagination spins out ignorant tales, fascinated. It fancies that the western wind blows on the Self, and leaves fall at the feet of the Self for a reason, and people are watching. 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.

This hospital, like every other, is a hole in the universe through which holiness issues in blasts. It blows both ways, in and out of time.

Yes, it's tough, it's tough, that goes without saying. But isn't waiting itself and longing a wonder, being played on by wind, sun, and shade?

The silence is not suppression; instead, it is all there is.

There was only silence. It was the silence of matter caught in the act and embarrassed. There were no cells moving, and yet there were cells. I could see the shape of the land, how it lay holding silence. Its poise and its stillness were unendurable, like the ring of the silence you hear in your skull when you're little and notice you're living the ring which resumes later in life when you're sick.

In nature, improbabilities are the one stock in trade. The whole creation is one lunatic fringe. If creation had been left up to me, I'm sure I wouldn't have had the imagination or courage to do more than shape a single, reasonably sized atom, smooth as a snowball, and let it go at that.

Cruelty is a mystery, and a waste of pain.

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

Am I living?'...I forgot myself, and sank into dim and watery oblivion.

Private life, book life, took place where words met imagination without passing through the world.

Write as if you were dying.

What is important is the moment of opening a life and feeling it touch--with an electric hiss and cry--this speckled mineral sphere, our present world.