Annie Dillard Quotes

Poetry and art nourish the soul of the world with the flavor-filled substances of beauty, wisdom and truth.

Poetry does so many different things, it's difficult to say anything definitive about its role, which of course varies from culture to culture. It can range from being stories of the tribe to the private lyric, to being as W.H. Auden said "the clear expression of mixed feelings" to nonsense verse.

Science has to do with facts, art with phenomena. To science, phenomena are of use only as they lead to facts; and to art, facts are of use only as they lead to phenomena.

The beauty of poetry is that the creation transcends the poet.

To me, art begets art. Painting feeds the eye just as poetry feeds the ear, which is to say that both feed the soul.

It's like I understand images and some people understand poetry.

Painting (like poetry) chooses from universals what is most apposite. It brings together, in a single imaginary being, circumstances and characteristics which occur in nature in many different persons.

My work should be seen as poetry.

A good poem is an amazing thing: a perfectly distilled, articulate moment. It opens you up - sometimes slowly, like the blooming of a flower, and sometimes with a quick knife-slice.

The poet, by composing poems, uses a language that is neither dead nor living, that few people speak, and few people understand We are the servants of an unknown force that lives within us, manipulates us, and dictates this language to us.

The statue is then beautiful when it begins to be incomprehensible, when it is passing out of criticism, and can no longer be defined by compass and measuring-wand, but demands an active imagination to go with it, and to say what it is in the act of doing.

Science and religion are, of course, two different ways of looking at the universe; and it's the same universe with two different windows.

A poet is not an apostle; he drives out devils only by the power of the devil.

Fiction—and poetry and drama— cleanse the doors of perception.

Poets... are literal-minded men who will squeeze a word till it hurts.

Poetry is like painting: one piece takes your fancy if you stand close to it, another if you keep at some distance.

Poets of course are even more unpredictable than other writers, overwhelmed as they are by the moment they inhabit and finding it difficult to connect yesterday with tomorrow.

The spirit of poetry combines the profundity of the philosopher and the child's delight in bright pictures.

I don't think biology is replacing the feeling experienced through art. Biology is capable of giving additional insights. It's a parallel, not a substitutive process.

For me, poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose.

Sculpture and painting are moments of life; poetry is life itself.

Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing.

Willmott, the English essayist, says poetry is the natural religion of literature.

Poetry speaks most effectively and inclusively (whether in free or formal verse) when it recognizes its connection - without apology - to its musical and ritualistic origins.

Poetry is a sort of truancy, a dream within the dream of life, a wild flower planted among our wheat.