Annie Dillard's Quotes

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?'

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

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.

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

The surest sign of age is loneliness.

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 would like to learn, or remember, how to live.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

I'm a housewife: I spend far more time on housework than anything else.

There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.

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

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.

All my books started out as extravagant and ended up pure and plain.

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

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.

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

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