Annie Dillard Quotations | Page 3

It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.

Having chosen this foolishness, I was a free being. How could the world ever stop me, how could I betray myself, if I was not afraid?

Skin was earth; it was soil. I could see, even on my own skin, the joined trapezoids of dust specks God had wetted and stuck with his spit the morning he made Adam from dirt. Now, all these generations later, we people could still see on our skin the inherited prints of the dust specks of Eden.

why did I have to keep learning this same thing over and over?

Theirs is the mystery of continuous creation and all that providence implies: the uncertainty of vision, the horror of the fixed, the dissolution of the present, the intricacy of beauty, the pressure of fecundity, the elusiveness of the free, and the flawed nature of perfection.

Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.

What do I make of all this texture? What does it mean about the kind of world in which I have been set down? The texture of the world, its filigree and scrollwork, means that there is the possibility for beauty here, a beauty inexhaustible in its complexity, which opens to my knock, which answers in me a call I do not remember calling, and which trains me to the wild and extravagant nature of the spirit I seek.

People who read are not too lazy to turn on the television; they prefer books.

What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.

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