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.

There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.

I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again.

You can’t test courage cautiously.

I noticed this process of waking, and predicted with terrifying logic that one of these years not far away I would be awake continuously and never slip back, and never be free of myself again.

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?”

Crystals grew inside rock like arithmetic flowers. They lengthened and spread, added plane to plane in an awed and perfect obedience to an absolute geometry that even stones – maybe only the stones – understood.

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.

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

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.

Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.

Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.

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.

The surest sign of age is loneliness.

Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.

Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.

People love pretty much the same things best. A writer looking for subject inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.

The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.

There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by.

As a life’s work, I would remember everything – everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net.

The writer studies literature, not the world. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write.

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

As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.

The painter… does not fit the paints to the world. He most certainly does not fit the world to himself. He fits himself to the paint. The self is the servant who bears the paintbox and its inherited contents.