Annie Dillard: Quotes about the world

Annie Dillard is American writer. Explore interesting quotes on world.

Annie Dillard: 126 quotes8 likes

“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.”

“Admire the world for never ending on you -- as you would an opponent, without taking your eyes away from him, or walking away.”

Source: The Writing Life

“I had been chipping at the world idly, and had by accident uncovered vast and labyrinthine further worlds within it.”

Source: An American Childhood

“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 book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Source: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“Having chosen this foolishness, I was a free being. How could the world ever stop me, how could I betray myself, if I was not afraid?”

Source: An American Childhood

“Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.”

“The world which lay under darkness and stillness following the closing of the lid was not the world we know. The event was over. Its devastation lay around about us. The clamoring mind and heart stilled, almost indifferent, certainly disembodied, frail, and exhausted. The hills were hushed, obliterated. Up in the sky, like a crater from some distant cataclysm, was a hollow ring.”

" Total Eclipse https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/08/annie-dillards-total-eclipse/536148/", Teaching a Stone to Talk (1982)

“Any three-year-old can see how unsatisfactory and clumsy is this whole business of reproducing and dying by the billions. We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet. There is not a people in the world that behaves as badly as praying mantises. But wait, you say, there is no right and wrong in nature; right and wrong is a human concept. Precisely: we are moral creatures, then, in an amoral world. The universe that suckled us is a monster that does not care if we live or die—does not care if it itself grinds to a halt. It is fixed and blind, a robot programmed to kill. We are free and seeing; we can only try to outwit it at every turn to save our skins.”

" The Force That Drives the Flower https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1973/11/the-force-that-drives-the-flower/308963/", The Atlantic, Nov. 1973