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.
– Annie Dillard
Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.
– Annie Dillard
As a life's work, I would remember everything - everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net.
– Annie Dillard
As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.
– Annie Dillard
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?
– Annie Dillard
Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.
– Annie Dillard
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
– Annie Dillard
It could be that our faithlessness is a cowering cowardice born of our very smallness, a massive failure of imagination... If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed.
– Annie Dillard
Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you.
– Annie Dillard
The mind itself is an art object. It is a Mondrian canvas onto whose homemade grids it fits its own preselected products. Our knowledge is contextual and only contextual. Ordering and invention coincide: we call their collaboration knowledge.
– Annie Dillard
The surest sign of age is loneliness.
– Annie Dillard
There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.
– Annie Dillard
You can't test courage cautiously.
– Annie Dillard
There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by.
– Annie Dillard
There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable.
– Annie Dillard
People love pretty much the same things best. A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.
– Annie Dillard
It's a little silly to finally learn how to write at this age. But I long ago realized I was secretly sincere.
– Annie Dillard
It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as separating us from our creator, our very self-consciousness, is also the one thing that divides us from our fellow creatures. It was a bitter birthday present from evolution.
– Annie Dillard
I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.
– Annie Dillard
Buddhism notes that it is always a mistake to think your soul can go it alone.