Annie Dillard Quotes

She had never been so close to anybody. It was as if they were one being, together, not predator and prey, but partners in a dance.

so I love you because I know no other way than this: where I does not exist, nor you, so close that your hand on my chest is my hand, so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

The only way to find peace is when you are not separated, when you are not fighting, when you part of the whole.

There is a stage with people we love when we are no longer separate from them, but so close in sympathy that we live through them as directly as through ourselves. ... we push back our hair because theirs is in their eyes.

But here's the joy: my friend and I are one, Sweet flattery!

Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.

If you want to see mankind fully, look at a family. Within the family minds become organically one, and for this reason the family is total poetry.

Love is the affinity which links and draws together the elements of the world... Love, in fact, is the agent of universal synthesis.

The traditional family table is round. No corners. No sides. No head. No tail. Everything is smooth. The food is in the center, and each family member reaches over the same distance. Someone you love is next to you on each side, and no one is last or at the end. The person farthest away from you is also the person facing you.

I'm just like everyone. I like to feel togetherness with someone.

Anything that takes you out of the context of being separate is healing. Anything that takes you out of the context of separateness is intimacy.

We don't believe in a world of us versus them; we look at the world as all of us together.

Love is to be two and at the same time one.

Have you ever felt really close to someone? So close that you can't understand why you and the other person have two separate bodies, two separate skins?

A friend is simply one soul in two bodies.

Do you know what friendship is... it is to be brother and sister; two souls which touch without mingling, two fingers on one hand.

Friendship, I fancy, means one heart between two.

Two minds with but a single thought, two hearts that beat as one.

I am constantly preoccupied with how to remove distance so that we can all come closer together, so that we can all begin to sense we are the same, we are one.

We think the fire eats the wood. We are wrong. The wood reaches out to the flame. The fire licks at what the wood harbors, and the wood gives itself away to that intimacy, the manner in which we and the world meet each new day.

Of lovers whose bodies smell of each other Who think the same thoughts without need of speech

You ever feel like you know someone so much that they can breathe for you? Like when their chest and your chest rise and fall, they do it together because they have to? That's how it felt. That's how it always felt.

The word friends doesn't seem to stretch big enough to describe how we feel about each other. We forget where one of us starts and the other one stops.

If we are to live together in peace, we must come to know each other better.

Holding you, I held everything.