Quotes by Annie Dillard
Annie Dillard (b. 1945) — Schriftstellerin, Essayistin · Konfessionell unfestgelegt (christlich-mystisch geprägt) · USA
Annie Dillard (* 1945) ist eine US-amerikanische Schriftstellerin und Essayistin, die über zwei Jahrzehnte lang Literatur an der Wesleyan University lehrte. Bekannt wurde sie durch ihr mit dem Pulitzer-Preis ausgezeichnetes Werk „Pilgrim at Tinker Creek“, in dem sie Naturbeobachtungen mit Fragen nach Leid, Schönheit und christlicher Mystik verbindet. Für Bibelleser regen ihre Texte zu geistlicher Wachheit und Ehrfurcht vor Gottes Größe an, wenngleich ihre theologische Ungebundenheit in konservativ-evangelikalen Kreisen auch auf Vorbehalte stieß.
Era: Today
Recurring topics: Meaning & Identity, Wisdom & Understanding, Time & Transience, Faith & Trust, Service & Love of Neighbour, Humility & Pride, Prayer & Silence, Guidance & God's Will
Quotes by Annie Dillard
I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.
Annie Dillard
The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.
Annie Dillard
The impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.
Annie Dillard
Self-forgetfulness is tremendously invigorating. I wonder if we don't waste most of our energy just by spending every waking minute saying hello to ourselves.
Annie Dillard
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
Annie Dillard
There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by.
Annie Dillard
No, the point is not only does time fly and do we die, but that in these reckless conditions we live at all, and are vouchsafed, for the duration of certain inexplicable moments, to know it.
Annie Dillard
It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale.
Annie Dillard
You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it.
Annie Dillard
We are here to witness the creation and to abet it.
Annie Dillard
If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" "No," said the priest, "not if you did not know." "Then why," asked the Eskimo earnestly, "did you tell me?"
Annie Dillard
I alternate between thinking of the planet as home — dear and familiar stone hearth and garden — and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners.
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 world is wider in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain and Lazarus.
Annie Dillard
Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon?
Annie Dillard
There are no events but thoughts and the heart's hard turning, the heart's slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times.
Annie Dillard
I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as a dying friend. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.
Annie Dillard
These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.
Annie Dillard
What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are not they both saying: Hello? We spy on whales and on interstellar radio objects; we starve ourselves and pray till we're blue.
Annie Dillard
We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence.
Annie Dillard
When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it? But the world without light is wasteland and chaos, and a life without sacrifice is abomination.
Annie Dillard
You can serve or you can sing, and wreck your heart in prayer, working the world's hard work.
Annie Dillard
I center down—I retreat, not inside myself, but outside myself.
Annie Dillard
I am a fugitive and a vagabond, a sojourner seeking signs.
Annie Dillard
We live in all we seek.
Annie Dillard
Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand—that of finding a workable compromise between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us.
Annie Dillard
I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you.
Annie Dillard
The soul may ask God for anything, and never fail.
Annie Dillard
The real and proper question is: why is it beautiful?
Annie Dillard
We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet.
Annie Dillard
Sources: wikipedia.org, enotes.com, latimes.com, galaxie.com
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