Annie Dillard citations

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

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Books swept me away, this way and that, one after the other; I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them.”

“Last forever!' Who hasn't prayed that prayer? You were lucky to get it in the first place. The present is a freely given canvas. That it is constantly being ripped apart and washed downstream goes without saying.”

“We live in all we seek.”

“A schedule defends from chaos and whim. A net for catching days.”

“We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet.”

“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.”

“Make connections; let rip; and dance where you can.”

“The real and proper question is: why is it beautiful?”

“I am a fugitive and a vagabond, a sojourner seeking signs.”

“It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.”