Annie Dillard Mind Quotations

Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so that we may feel again their majesty and power? What do we ever know that is higher than that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered?

The mind wants the world to return its love, or its awareness; the mind wants to know all the world, and all eternity, and God.

Almost all of my many passionate interests, and my many changes of mind, came through books. Books prompted the many vows I made to myself.

We are here to witness. There is nothing else to do with those mute materials we do not need. Until Larry teaches his stone to talk, until God changes his mind, or until the pagan gods slip back to their hilltop groves, all we can do with the whole inhuman array is watch it.

I never met a man who was shaken by a field of identical blades of grass. An acre of poppies and a forest of spruce boggle no one's mind.

The mind itself is an art object. It is a Mondrian canvas onto whose homemade grids it fits its own preselected products. Our knowledge is contextual and only contextual. Ordering and invention coincide: we call their collaboration knowledge.

Novels written with film contracts in mind have a faint but unmistakable, and ruinous, odor.

Like everyone in his right mind, I feared Santa Claus.

The mind of the writer does indeed do something before it dies, and so does its owner, but I would be hard put to call it living.