How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
About Annie Dillard
Annie Dillardis an American author, best known for her narrative prose in both fiction and non-fiction. She has published works of poetry, essays, prose, and literary criticism, as well as two novels and one memoir.
More quotes from 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.
American writer
There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.
American writer
I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again.
American writer
You can’t test courage cautiously.
American writer
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.
American writer
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?”
American writer
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.
American writer
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.
American writer
I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.
American writer
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.
American writer
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.
American writer
Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.
American writer
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.
American writer
The surest sign of age is loneliness.
American writer
Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.
American writer
Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.
American writer
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.
American writer
The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.
American writer
There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by.
American writer
As a life’s work, I would remember everything – everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net.
American writer
The writer studies literature, not the world. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write.
American writer
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
American writer
As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.
American writer
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.
American writer