Words matter. These are the best Annie Dillard Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
Our family was on the lunatic fringe. My mother was always completely irrepressible. My father made crowd noises into a microphone.
The mind of the writer does indeed do something before it dies, and so does its owner, but I would be hard put to call it living.
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?’
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.
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.
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.
The surest sign of age is loneliness.
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.
Matters of taste are not, it turns out, moral issues.
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.
‘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.
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.
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.
The writer studies literature, not the world. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write.
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
I can’t dance anymore. Total knee replacements. I can’t do anything anymore.
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.
A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.
Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.
If you’re going to publish a book, you probably are going to make a fool of yourself.
Write about winter in the summer.
Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.
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.
I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.
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.
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.
There is no such thing as an artist – only the world, lit or unlit, as the world allows.
All my books started out as extravagant and ended up pure and plain.
