Annie Dillard Quotes

To dust is only to forestall burial

Is it not late? A late time to be living? Are not our generations the crucial ones? For we have changed the world. Are not our heightened times the important ones? For we have nuclear bombs. Are we not especially significant because our century is? - our century and its unique Holocaust, its refugee populations, its serial totalitarian exterminations; our century and its antibiotics, silicon chips, men on the moon, and spliced genes? No, we are not and it is not. These times of ours are ordinary times, a slice of life like any other. Who can bear to hear this, or who will consider it?...

Take away the bomb threat and what are we? Ordinary beads on a never-ending string. Our time is a routine twist of an improbable yarn...There must be something heroic about our time, something that lifts it above all those other times. Plague? Funny weather? Dire things are happening...
Why are we watching the news, reading the news, keeping up with the news? Only to enforce our fancy - probably a necessary lie - that these are crucial times, and we are in on them. Newly revealed, and we are in the know: crazy people, bunches of them. New diseases, shifts in power, floods! Can the news from dynastic Egypt have been any different?

Write as if you were dying.

So live. I'll be the nun for you. I am now.

The death of self of which the great writers speak is no violent act. It is merely the joining of the great rock heart of the earth in its roll. It is merely the slow cessation of the will's spirits and the intellect's chatter: it is waiting like a hollow bell with a stilled tongue. Fuge, tace, quiesce. The waiting itself is the thing.

The silence is not suppression; instead, it is all there is.

Cruelty is a mystery, and a waste of pain.

In nature, improbabilities are the one stock in trade. The whole creation is one lunatic fringe. If creation had been left up to me, I'm sure I wouldn't have had the imagination or courage to do more than shape a single, reasonably sized atom, smooth as a snowball, and let it go at that.

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.

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.

I couldn't unpeach the peaches.

On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away.

"Only after a writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature. In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers said, "It is the trade entering his body." The art must enter the body, too."

"In Pliny I read about the invention of clay modeling. A Sicyonian potter came to Corinth. There his daughter fell in love with a young man who had to make frequent long journeys away from the city. When he sat with her at home, she used to trace the outline of his shadow that a candle’s light cast on the wall. Then, in his absence she worked over the profile, deepening, so that she might enjoy his face, and remember. One day the father slapped some potter’s clay over the gouged plaster; when the clay hardened he removed it, baked it, and "showed it abroad" (63)."

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