Annie Dillard Quotes

I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wandering awed about on a splintered wreck I've come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty bats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them...

I don't know what it is about fecundity that so appalls: I suppose it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind; that life itself is so astonishingly cheap; that nature is as careless as it is bountiful; and that with extravagance goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives.

There must be bands of enthusiasts for everything on earth -- fanatics who shared a vocabulary, a batch of technical skills and equipment, and, perhaps, a vision of some single slice of the beauty and mystery of things, of their complexity, fascination, and unexpectedness.

The dedicated life is the life worth living.

No; we have been as usual asking the wrong question. It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singing. The real and proper question is why is it beautiful?

Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.

A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.

Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.

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 don't know what it is about fecundity that so appalls. I suppose it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonishingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful, and that with extravagance goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives.