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

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.
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

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.
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

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.
Annie Dillard


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

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

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.
Annie Dillard

Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you.
Annie Dillard

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

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.
Annie Dillard

The surest sign of age is loneliness.
Annie Dillard

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