Annie Dillard Quotes

Books are meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower steel, stitch, cloud and clout, and drumbeats on the air.

Books stay with me and have shaped me and made huge impacts on my life.

'Swan,' by Mary Oliver. Poems and prose. Reading from this book is as if visiting a very wise friend. There is wisdom and welcoming kindness on every page.

I'm hungry for knowledge. The whole thing is to learn every day, to get brighter and brighter. That's what this world is about. You look at someone like Gandhi, and he glowed. Martin Luther King glowed. Muhammad Ali glows. I think that's from being bright all the time, and trying to be brighter.

Acting is a sense of wonder and magic and mystery for me and when life takes me on a new journey, I simply remember the smile my first ballet recital put on my face and I move forward.

Books have the power to be the light we are seeking at crucial moments in our lives. Reading helps us realize we are not alone, that we can change our circumstances and even achieve the impossible.

A great man is a torch in the darkness, a beacon in superstition's night, an inspiration and a prophecy.

I was inspired to spend an entire year - my 65th year - reading, researching, and meditating on Lao-tzu's messages, practicing them and ultimately writing down these insights as I felt Lao-tzu wanted us to know them.

Lion sounds that have not grown from the mouse may exude naked power... but cannot convey any wisdom or understanding... The initial steps on the path to courageous speech then are the first tentative steps into the parts of us that cannot speak.

A collection of good books, with a soul to it in the shape of a librarian, becomes a vitalized power among the impulses by which the world goes on to improvement.

Books still accomplish miracles; they persuade men.

Paulo Coelho is a very important writer, and I have discovered a lot about myself through his texts.

Love liberates you and gives you the power to make the impossible possible.

I want to go on being a student," I told him. "I want to be a teacher. I'm just a reader," I said. "DON'T SOUND SO ASHAMED," he said. "READING IS A GIFT." "I learned it from you," I told him. "IT DOESN'T MATTER WHERE YOU LEARNED IT- IT'S A GIFT. IF YOU CARE ABOUT SOMETHING, YOU HAVE TO PROTECT IT. IF YOU'RE LUCKY ENOUGH TO FIND A WAY OF LIFE YOU LOVE, YOU HAVE TO FIND THE COURAGE TO LIVE IT.

Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?

Knowledge and courage take turns at greatness.

In your light I learn how to love.

All life is an experiment. Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which animates all whom it floats, and you are without effort impelled to truth, to right and a perfect contentment. I wish to write such rhymes as shall not suggest a restraint, but contrariwise the wildest freedom. Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.

Books-bright windows in this life of ours, lit by the shining souls of men.

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst...They are for nothing but to inspire.

The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species.

Closed minds do not inspire faith, courage, and belief

I borrowed his brightness and used it to see my way, and then gradually, from the habit of looking at the world as he illuminated it, the light in my own mind rekindled.

Fortunate is he whose mind has the power to probe the causes of things and trample underfoot all terrors and inexorable fate.

There are leaders and there are those who lead. Leaders hold a position of power or influence. Those who lead inspire us.