Annie Dillard Quotes

The tyranny imposed on the soul by anger, or fear, or lust, or pain, or envy, or desire, I generally call 'injustice.'

By his monstrous way of life he seemed to have put himself beyond the limits of reality. Nothing moved him or spoke to him from the real world unless he heard it in an echo of the infuriated cries within him.

As a jealous man, I suffer four times over: because I am jealous, because I blame myself for being so, because I fear that my jealousy will wound the other, because I allow myself to be subject to a banality: I suffer from being excluded, from being aggressive, from being crazy, and from being common.

The heart itself is beyond control. That is its power, and its weakness.

i'm a slave to my emotions, to my likes, to my hatred of boredom, to most of my desires

She thought about her life and how lost she’d felt for most of it. She thought about the way that all truths she’d been taught to consider valuable invariably conflicted with the world as it was actually lived. How could a person be so utterly lost, yet remain living?

If I didn't think, I'd be much happier; if I didn't have any sex organs, I wouldn't waver on the brink of nervous emotion and tears all the time.

Inside and out, Westley's world was ripping apart and he could do nothing but crack along with it.

The world is full of magical places, and the library has always been one of them for me. A library can be that special place for our children.

As humans, we get filled with jealousy, at times, and rage, and I am no exception. I can get incredibly angry, to the point that I get ashamed of my actions.

What can the will do when the heart commands?

Sometimes you can cattle rope your heart and sometimes you can't, is all.

I cannot do it. I cannot bear it. I cannot go back to what I was here. I cannot stand at her side and watch another take her. I am not that strong or that good.

The thing in the world I am most afraid of is fear, and with good reason; that passion alone, in the trouble of it, exceeding all other accidents

A woman seldom comes out of a sullen spell until she's sure her husband has suffered as much as she thinks he should.

There was something about a man with a shovel, and the sweat on his neck might as well have been chocolate sauce. It wasn't fair. Brains and brawns should be two separate categories, not bundled into one irresistible package. She needed to pull herself together before she went after him with a spoon. But where to start?

Ethan thought he was doing the right thing. He knew it was crazy. And he didn’t want to go, but he had to anyway. Ethan was like that. Even if he was dead. He saved the world, but he shattered mine. What now?

A stranger to myself and to the world, armed solely with a thought that negates itself as soon as it asserts, what is this condition in which I can have peace only by refusing to know and to live, in which the appetite for conquest bumps into walls that defy its assaults?

People are running, running, but there is no place in the world to which they can flee to escape themselves. Ultimately, each one must face himself.

Why does the mind do such things? Turn on us, rend us, dig the claws in. If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart. Maybe it's much the same.

Anger is my biggest enemy in life.

It seemed to Alabama that, reaching her goal, she would drive the devils that had driven her - that, in proving herself, she would achieve that peace which she imagined went only in surety of one’s self - that she would be able, through the medium of the dance, to command her emotions, to summon love or pity or happiness at will, having provided a channel through which they might flow. She drove herself mercilessly, and the summer dragged on.

The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally. A higher paradox confounds emotion as well as reason and there are long periods in the lives of all of us, and of the saints, when the truth as revealed by faith is hideous, emotionally disturbing, downright repulsive. Witness the dark night of the soul in individual saints. Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul.

But it was not the room’s disorder which was frightening; it was the fact that when one began searching for the key to this disorder, one realized that it was not to be found in any of the usual places. For this was not a matter of habit or circumstance or temperament; it was a matter of punishment and grief.

Every heart is the lair of a ferocious animal. The greatest wrong that you can put upon a man is to provoke him to let out his beast.