Annie Dillard Quotes

The Wine of Life keeps oozing drop by drop, The Leaves of Life keep falling one by one.

Reflect often upon the rapidity with which all existing things, or things coming into existence, sweep past us and are carried away.

Time goes by so fast. Nothin' can outrun it. Death commences too early--almost before you're half-acquainted with life--you meet the other.

This is your life and its ending one moment at a time.

Faith, sir, we are here today, and gone tomorrow.

Even at our birth, death does but stand aside a little. And every day he looks towards us and muses somewhat to himself whether that day or the next he will draw nigh.

Swift speedy time, feathered with flying hours, Dissolves the beauty of the fairest brow.

Like as the waves make towards the pebbl'd shore, so do our minutes, hasten to their end.

I feel very much aware of my mortality. I'm here, and then I'm not. It's the same thing with everything else: the movie comes out, and then it's gone. Everything is changing all the time, and I'm not going to stress out and spend my entire time chasing something that ultimately doesn't exist.

Remember you must die whether you sit about moping all day long or whether on feast days you stretch out in a green field, happy with a bottle of Falernian from your innermost cellar.

Life, struck sharp on death, Makes awful lightning.

Every thing admonishes us how needlessly long life is.

Nature has given man no better thing than shortness of life.

The shortness of life, so often lamented, may be the best thing about it.

But when to-morrow comes, yesterday's morrow will have been already spent: and lo! a fresh morrow will be for ever making away with our years, each just beyond our grasp.

Our lives fade behind us before we die.

I wonder if one of the penalties of growing older is that you become more and more conscious that nothing is very permanent.

Summer will end soon enough, and childhood as well.

Life was precious. Life was fragile. Here one moment, gone the next. Every second should be milked for all it's worth because you never know when the bottom was going to drop out.

The damps of autumn sink into the leaves and prepare them for the necessity of their fall; and thus insensibly are we, as years close around us, detached from our tenacity of life by the gentle pressure of recorded sorrow.

Some men spend their whole life furnishing for themselves the things proper to life without realizing that at our birth each of us was poured a mortal brew to drink.

Our lives ... are but a little while, so let them run as sweetly as you can, and give no thought to grief from day to day. For time is not concerned to keep our hopes, but hurries on its business, and is gone.