If I actually believed that the progress of human understanding depended on our crop of contemporary novelists, I would shoot myself.
Annie DillardOn plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away.
Annie DillardYoung children have no sense of wonder. They bewilder well, but few things surprise them. All of it is new to young children, after all, and equally gratuitous.
Annie DillardTime is the warp and matter the weft of the woven texture of beauty in space, and death is the hurling shuttle.
Annie DillardThe world is wider in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain and Lazarus.
Annie DillardWhen I was quite young I fondly imagined that all foreign languages were codes for English. I thought that "hat," say, was the real and actual name of the thing, but that people in other countries, who obstinately persisted in speaking the code of their forefathers, might use the word "ibu," say, to designate not merely the concept hat, but the English word "hat." I knew only one foreign word, "oui," and since it had three letters as did the word for which it was a code, it seemed, touchingly enough, to confirm my theory.
Annie Dillard