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"Books swept me away, this way and that, one after the other; I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them."
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"Reading doesn't mean accepting everything you read, it means reasoning everything you read."
"In fact, mistakes are life's way of teaching us the right way to do things."
"We often know information but not the epistemology of that information."
"Failure is the school of greatness."
"We are not perfect. We are here to learn. Earth is one big classroom and God is our heavenly guidance counselor and teacher."
"Experience is a master teacher, even when it's not our own."
"I don't recall that when I was in high school or college, any novel was ever presented to me to study as a novel. In fact, I was well on the way to getting a Master's degree in English before I really knew what fiction was, and I doubt if I would ever have learned then, had I not been trying to write it. I believe that it's perfectly possible to run a course of academic degrees in English and to emerge a seemingly respectable Ph.D. and still not know how to read fiction."
Explore more quotes by Annie Dillard
"I smelled silt on the wind, turkey, laundry, leaves . . . my God what a world. There is no accounting for one second of it (267)."
"Those of us who read carried around with us like martyrs a secret knowledge, a secret joy and a secret hope: There is a life worth living where history is still taking place; there are ideas worth dying for, and circumstances where courage is still prized."
"Somewhere and I can't find where I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked the local missionary priest 'If I did not know about God and sin would I go to hell?' 'No' said the priest 'not if you did not know.' 'Then why ' asked the Eskimo earnestly 'did you tell me?'"
"The most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one's own most intimate sensitivity."
"I alternate between thinking of the planet as home - dear and familiar stone hearth and garden - and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners."
"You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it."
"Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles."
"I think science works the way a tightrope walker works: by not looking at its feet. As soon as it looks at its feet, it realizes its operating in midair."
"It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won't stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple. What you see is what you get."
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