Annie Dillard Quotes

“The dark night into which the world was plunging was not a sleep but an awakening.”

“Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain.”

“It could be that God has not absconded but spread, as our vision and understanding of the universe have spread, to a fabric of spirit and sense so grand and subtle, so powerful in a new way, that we can only feel blindly of its hem.”

“Time is the continuous loop, the snakeskin with scales endlessly overlapping without beginning or end.”

“The secret of seeing is, then, the pearl of great price.”

“We’re played on like a pipe; our breath is not our own.”

“And we the people are so vulnerable. Our bodies are shot with mortality. Our legs are fear and our arms are time.”

“It is the fixed that horrifies us, the fixed that assails us with the tremendous force of its mindlessness.”

“I bloom indoors like a forced forsythia; I come in to come out.”

“Beauty itself is the language to which we have no key.”