Annie Dillard Quotes

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.

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

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

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?"

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

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

It could be that our faithlessness is a cowering cowardice born of our very smallness, a massive failure of imagination... If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed.

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

The mind itself is an art object. It is a Mondrian canvas onto whose homemade grids it fits its own preselected products. Our knowledge is contextual and only contextual. Ordering and invention coincide: we call their collaboration knowledge.

The surest sign of age is loneliness.

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

You can't test courage cautiously.