The creatures I seek do not want to be seen. Annie Dillard More Quotes by Annie Dillard More Quotes From Annie Dillard Last forever!' Who hasn't prayed that prayer? You were lucky to get it in the first place. The present is a freely given canvas. That it is constantly being ripped apart and washed downstream goes without saying. Annie Dillard prayerforeverinspiring You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then-and only then-it is handed to you. Annie Dillard breakbrainheart Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff. Annie Dillard sailpuffspirit I think that the dying pray at the last not please but thank you, as a guest thanks his host at the door. Falling from airplanes the people are crying thank you, thank you, all down the air; and the cold carriages draw up for them on the rocks. Annie Dillard airplanelifefall Experiencing the present purely is being empty and hollow; you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall. Annie Dillard timeinspirationallife Caring passionately about something isn't against nature, and it isn't against human nature. It's what we're here to do. Annie Dillard human-naturehumanscaring She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live. Annie Dillard breatheairbook We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all. Annie Dillard fancy The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit's one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself like a once-blind man unbound. The gaps are the clefts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fiords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock-more than a maple-universe. Annie Dillard cellshomemen We live in all we seek. The hidden shows up in too-plain sight. It lives captive on the face of the obvious - the people, events, and things of the day - to which we as sophisticated children have long since become oblivious. What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color. Annie Dillard colorlyingchildren What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color. Annie Dillard holinesscolorlying Make connections; let rip; and dance where you can. Annie Dillard ripconnections After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames. Annie Dillard flameseyefire One of the few things I know about writing is this: Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book, give it, give it all, give it now. Annie Dillard inspirationallifebook An Eskimo shaman said, Life's greatest danger lies in the fact that man's food consists entirely of souls. Annie Dillard said-lifemenlying As a thinker I keep discovering that beauty itself is as much a fact, and a mystery...I consider nature's facts -- its beautiful and grotesque forms and events -- in terms of the import to thought and their impetus to the spirit. In nature I find grace tangled in a rapture with violence; I find an intricate landscape whose forms are fringed in death; I find mystery, newness, and a kind of exuberant, spendthrift energy. Annie Dillard tangledgracebeautiful I would like to live. . . open to time and death painlessly, noticing everything, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will. Annie Dillard fiercerememberlife No child on earth was ever meant to be ordinary, and you can see it in them, and they know it, too, but then the times get to them, and the wear out their brains learning what folks expect, and spend their strength trying to rise over those same folks. Annie Dillard braintryingchildren I feel as though I stand at the foot of an infinitely high staircase, down which some exuberant spirit is flinging tennis ball after tennis ball, eternally, and the one thing I want in the world is a tennis ball. Annie Dillard tennisballsfeet [Insects] are not only cold-blooded, and green- and yellow-blooded, but are also cased in a clacking horn. They have rigid eyes and brains strung down their backs. But they make up the bulk of our comrades-at-life, so I look to them for a glimmer of companionship. Annie Dillard eyebrainyellow
