Annie Dillard Quotes: 13

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

  The Living

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

  The Writing Life

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

• 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?

• 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.

  Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

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

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

• I am a fugitive and a vagabond, a sojourner seeking signs.

  Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

• Could two live that way? Could two live under the wild rose, and explore by the pond, so that the smooth mind of each is as everywhere present to the other, and as received and as unchallenged, as falling snow?

  Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

• The soul may ask God for anything, and never fail.

  Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

• Geography is the key, the crucial accident of birth. A piece of protein could be a snail, a sea lion, or a systems analyst, but it had to start somewhere. This is not science; it is merely metaphor. And the landscape in which the protein "starts"shapes its end as surely as bowls shape water.

  Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

• Under her high brows, she eyed him straight on and straight across. She had gone to girls' schools, he recalled later. Those girls looked straight at you.

  The Maytrees

• I am a sacrifice bound with cords to the horns of the world's rock altar, waiting for worms. I take a deep breath, I open my eyes. Looking, I see there are worms in the horns of the altar like live maggots in amber, there are shells of worms in the rock and moths flapping at my eyes. A wind from no place rises. A sense of the real exults me; the cords loosen: I walk on my way.

  Pilgrim at Tinker Creek