Quotes By Annie Dillard

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.

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

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.

There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable.

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

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

According to Inuit culture in Greenland, a person possesses six or seven souls. The souls take the form of tiny people scattered throughout the body.

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

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

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 writer studies literature, not the world.

The painter... does not fit the paints to the world. He most certainly does not fit the world to himself. He fits himself to the paint. The self is the servant who bears the paintbox and its inherited contents.

The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.

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.

The surest sign of age is loneliness.

God gave me a talent to draw. I 'owed' it to him to develop the talent.

At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it.

Write about winter in the summer.

Aim for the chopping block. If you aim for the wood, you will have nothing. Aim past the wood, aim through the wood; aim for the chopping block.

I can't dance anymore. Total knee replacements. I can't do anything anymore.

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

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

If you're going to publish a book, you probably are going to make a fool of yourself.

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

There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by.

The Pulitzer is more useful than meaningful.

It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as separating us from our creator, our very self-consciousness, is also the one thing that divides us from our fellow creatures. It was a bitter birthday present from evolution.

You can't test courage cautiously.

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

Much has been written about the life of the mind.