Annie Dillard: Trending quotes

“Similarly, 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.”

“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?”

“I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.”

“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.”

“One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time… give it, give it all, give it now.”

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

“She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.”

“You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.”

“Spend the afternoon, you can't take it with you.”

“I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.”

“Nothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves.”

“He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write. He is careful of what he learns, for that is what he will know.”

“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.”

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

“The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.”

“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.”

“You can't test courage cautiously, so I ran hard and waved my arms hard, happy.”

“Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?”

“She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live. She read books as one would breathe ether, to sink in and die.”