Annie Dillard

I worked so hard all my life, and all I want to do now is read.

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.

A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.

The irrational haunts the metaphysical.

It's a little silly to finally learn how to write at this age. But I long ago realized I was secretly sincere.

[Insects] are not only cold-blooded, and green- and yellow-blooded, but are also cased in a clacking horn. They have rigid eyes and brains strung down their backs. But they make up the bulk of our comrades-at-life, so I look to them for a glimmer of companionship.

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

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

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

Write about winter in the summer.

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.

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.

Much has been written about the life of the mind.

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.

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.

This hospital like every other is a hole in the universe through which holiness issues in blasts. It blows both ways in and out of time.

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

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.

Make connections let rip and dance where you can.

The writer studies literature, not the world.

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

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.

Geography is the key the crucial accident of birth. A piece of protein could be a snail a sea lion or a systems analyst but it had to start somewhere. This is not science it is merely metaphor. And the landscape in which the protein starts shapes its end as surely as bowls shape water.

The surest sign of age is loneliness.

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

Private life, book life, took place where words met imagination without passing through the world.

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.

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?"

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?'

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.

Push it. Examine all things intensely and relentlessly.

'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.

The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper; I cannot quite make it out.

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

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.

Write as if you were dying.

When I teach, I preach. I thump the Bible. I exhort my students morally. I talk to them about the dedicated life.

The Pulitzer is more useful than meaningful.

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.

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.

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

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

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

There is no such thing as an artist - only the world, lit or unlit, as the world allows.

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.

You can't test courage cautiously.

It makes more sense to write one big book - a novel or nonfiction narrative - than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all you possess and learn.

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

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.

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

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

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

When I first read the words 'introvert' and 'extrovert' when I was 10, I thought I was both.

Just think: in all the clean, beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a blot; our planet alone has death.

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

I never met a man who was shaken by a field of identical blades of grass. An acre of poppies and a forest of spruce boggle no one's mind.

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

Matters of taste are not, it turns out, moral issues.

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

People love pretty much the same things best. A writer looking for subject 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.