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Authors:

Annie Dillard quotes

American Author April 30, 1945

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Quotes

There is always an enormous temptation to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. Annie Dillard
Theirs is the mystery of continuous creation and all that providence implies: the uncertainty of vision, the horror of the fixed, the dissolution of the present, the intricacy of beauty, the pressure of fecundity, the elusiveness of the free, and the flawed nature of perfection. Annie Dillard
Our interpreting the universe as an artifact absolutely requires that we posit an author for it, or a celestial fimmaker, dramatist, painter, sculptor, composer, architect, or choreographer. And no one has been willing openly to posit such an artist for the universe since the American transcedentalists and before them the Medieval European philosophers. Annie Dillard
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. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wondering awed about on a splintered wreck I've come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty bats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite... Annie Dillard
I used to have a cat, an old fighting tom, who would jump through the open window by my bed in the middle of the night and land on my chest. I'd half-awaken. He'd stick his skull under my nose and purr, stinking of urine and blood. Some nights he kneaded my bare chest with his front paws, powerfully, arching his back, as if sharpening his claws, or pummeling a mother for milk. And some mornings I'd wake in daylight to find my body covered with paw prints in blood; I looked as though I'd been... Annie Dillard
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. Annie Dillard
Annie Dillard quote: "Why, why in the blue-green world write this sort of thing? ..."
Why, why in the blue-green world write this sort of thing? Funny written culture, I guess; we pass things on. Annie Dillard
Annie Dillard quote: "it is everlastingly funny that the proud, metaphysically..."
it is everlastingly funny that the proud, metaphysically ambitious, clamoring mind will hush if you give it an egg. Annie Dillard
Annie Dillard quote: "We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death,..."
We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence... Annie Dillard
Nature is, above all, profligate. Don't believe them when they tell you how economical and thrifty nature is, whose leaves return to the soil. Wouldn't it be cheaper to leave them on the tree in the first place? This deciduous business alone is a radical scheme, the brainchild of a deranged manic-depressive with limitless capital. Extravagance! Nature will try anything once. Annie Dillard
Under her high brows, she eyed him straight on and straight across. She had gone to girls' schools, he recalled later. Those girls looked straight at you. Annie Dillard
Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation's short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit. Annie Dillard
Whenever there is stillness there is the still small voice, God's speaking from the whirlwind, nature's old song, and dance... Annie Dillard
The mountains are great stone bells; they clang together like nuns. Who shushed the stars? There are a thousand million galaxies easily seen in the Palomar reflector; collisions between and among them do, of course, occur. But these collisions are very long and silent slides. Billions of stars sift amont each other untouched, too distant even to be moved, heedless as always, hushed. The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper; I cannot quite make it out. But God knows I... Annie Dillard
All the green in the planted world consists of these whole, rounded chloroplasts wending their ways in water. If you analyze a molecule of chlorophyll itself, what you get is one hundred thirty-six atoms of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen arranged in an exact and complex relationship around a central ring. At the ring's center is a single atom of magnesium. Now: If you remove the atom of magnesium and in its exact place put an atom of iron, you get a molecule of hemoglobin. The... Annie Dillard

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