Annie Dillard Quotes

When you've been living in hope for a long time as I have, suddenly you realize that certainty is far more desirable than hope.

Without hope we live in desire.

Hope is merely another face of desire.

This has been a dream for me.

To hope for Paradise is to live in Paradise, a very different thing from actually getting there.

Desire is never final, desire is imprecise and impractical [...]

She shook her head as she confessed, "I want it so much, I'm afraid to hope." "Never be afraid to hope," Rohan said gently. "It's the only way to begin." -Rohan to Win

yearning n. and adj. At te core of this desire is the belief that everything can be perfect.

Oh, must we dream our dreams and have them, too?

Desire is not what you see, but what you imagine.

Love, I take it, must look toward something not quite accessible, something not quite understood.

We wait always for something that does not come.

It is very common for us to desire most what we are least qualified to obtain.

Life might just be an absurd, even crude, chain of events and nothing more.

You may win your heart's desire, but in the end you're cheated of it by death.

We should wish for few things with eagerness, if we perfectly knew the nature of that which was the object of our desire.

Ed?" Ritchie says later. We're still standing in the water. "There's only one thing I want." "What's that, Ritchie?" His answer is simple. "To want.

We're always looking for something.

You want what you want, whether or not you think you can have it.

Hope's one thing, expectation's quite another.

The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing — desire.

I like the way the morning can be stormy and the afternoon clear and sparkly as a jewel in the water. Put your hand in the water to reach for a sea urchin or a sea shell, and the thing desired never quite lies where you had lined it up to be. The same is true of love. In prospect or contemplation, love is where it seems to be. Reach in to lift it out and your hand misses

But they wanted you. Time is not something you give back. The very next moment may be answer to your prayer. To deny that is to deny the most important part of the future.

Whatever you want is as elusive as you make it.

Would you mind repeating that? I'm afraid I might have lost my wits altogether and just hallucinated what I've longed to hear.