549 Quotes by Annie Dillard

"I set up and staged hundreds of ends-of-the-world and watched, enthralled, as they played themselves out."

"He judged the instant and let go; he flung himself loose into the stars."

"I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend. During visiting hours, I enter its room with dread and sympathy for its many disorders. I hold its hand and hope it will get better. This tender relationship can change in a twinkling. If you skip a visit or two, a work in progress will turn on you."

"The feeling that the work is magnificent, and the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged."

"On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away."

"Whenever there is stillness there is the still small voice, God's speaking from the whirlwind, nature's old song, and dance..."

"I myself was both observer and observable, and so a possible object of my own humming awareness."

"Mountains are giant, restful, absorbent. You can heave your spirit into a mountain and the mountain will keep it, folded, and not throw it back as some creeks will. The creeks are the world with all its stimulus and beauty; I live there. But the mountains are home."

"I would like to learn, or remember, how to live."

"How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and with that one, is what we are doing."