Annie Dillard Quotes

He'd noticed that sex bore some resemblance to cookery: it fascinated people, they sometimes bought books full of complicated recipes and interesting pictures, and sometimes when they were really hungry they created vast banquets in their imagination - but at the end of the day they'd settle quite happily for egg and chips. If it was well done and maybe had a slice of tomato.

Everything that truly makes us happy is quite simple - love, sex and food!

White pudding and eggs and sausages and cups of tea! How simple and beautiful was life after all!

Free men must live simple lives and have simple pleasures.

Everything that truly makes us happy is quite simple: love, sex, and food! Everything else - power, influence, strength - all those things can overpower what's important in life. But as long as you have food and shelter over your head, if the necessities are taken care of, what makes us happy on top of that is very simple.

Man needs so little... yet he begins wanting so much.

How few our real wants, and how vast our imaginary ones!

Happiness is, in truth, a very cheap thing, when the heart will be contented to traffic with nature - art has quite a different price.

Dear Hilde, if the human brain was simple enough for us to understand, we would still be so stupid that we couldn't understand it. Love, Dad.

We all enter the world with fairly simple needs: to be protected, to be nurtured, to be loved unconditionally, and to belong.

The biggest lesson I've learned . . . was that if you have all the fresh water you want to drink and all the food you want to eat, you ought never to complain about anything.

The constant demands of the heart and the belly can allow man only an incidental indulgence in the pleasures of the eye and the understanding.

I am too easily contented with a slight and almost animal happiness. My happiness is a good deal like that of the woodchucks.

Hunger is the best sauce in the world.

To have her meals, and her daily walk, and her fill of novels, and to be left alone, was all that she asked of the gods.

The greatest lessons to be learned about life, love, purpose, meaning, and priority are to be learned from children.

We can be content with simplicity because the deepest most satisfying delights God gives us through creation are free gifts from nature and from loving relationships with people. After your basic needs are met, accumulated money begins to diminish your capacity for these pleasures rather than increase them. Buying things contributes absolutely nothing to the heart's capacity for joy.

If one's life is simple, contentment has to come.

The man is happiest who lives from day to day and asks no more, garnering the simple goodness of life.

He liked to fish; he seemed to take pride in being able to like such a stupid occupation.

If I can write one sentence, simple and true every day, I'll be satisfied.

But luxury has never appealed to me, I like simple things, books, being alone, or with somebody who understands.

The components of happiness are quite simple. Happiness is gentleness, peace, concentration, simplicity, forgiveness, humor, fearlessness, trust, and now. In its true form each quality includes all the rest, for happiness is whole, and one feels whole when genuinely happy.

How simple and frugal a thing is happiness.

[T]he kingdom of heaven is of the childlike, of those who are easy to please, who love and who give pleasure. Mighty men of their hands, the smiters and the builders and the judges, have lived long and done sternly and yet preserved this lovely character; and among our carpet interests and twopenny concerns, the shame were indelible if we should lose it. Gentleness and cheerfulness, these come before all morality; they are the perfect duties.