549 Quotes by Annie Dillard

"Aim for the chopping block. If you aim for the wood, you will have nothing. Aim past the wood, aim through the wood; aim for the chopping block."

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

"The line of words feels for cracks in the firmament."

"Silence is not our heritage but our destiny; we live where we want to live."

"The most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one’s own most intimate sensitivity."

"There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind. On a sunny day, the sun's energy on a square acre of land or pond can equal 4500 horsepower. These "horses" heave in every direction, like slaves building pyramids, and fashion, from the bottom up, a new and sturdy world."

"Where is privacy, if not in the mind?"

"Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment."

"She reads books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live"

"All those things for which we have no words are lost. The mind—the culture—has two little tools, grammar and lexicon: a decorated sand bucket and a matching shovel. With these we bluster about the continents and do all the world's work. With these we try to save our very lives."