Top 100 Annie Dillard Quotes
#1. I didn't cry, because, actually, I was an intercontinental ballistic missile, with an atomic warhead; they don't cry. Why
Annie Dillard
#2. There is always an enormous temptation to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end.
Annie Dillard
#3. You do what you do out of your private love of the thing itself.
Annie Dillard
#4. We still and always want waking. We should amass half dressed in long lines like tribesmen and shake gourds at each other, to wake up; instead we watch television and miss the show.
Annie Dillard
#5. I set up and staged hundreds of ends-of-the-world and watched, enthralled, as they played themselves out.
Annie Dillard
#6. The question was not death; living things die. It was love. Not that we died, but that we cared wildly, then deeply, for one person out of billions. We bound ourselves to the fickle, changing, and dying as if they were rock.
Annie Dillard
#7. You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then-and only then-it is handed to you.
Annie Dillard
#8. I had been chipping at the world idly, and had by accident uncovered vast and labyrinthine further worlds within it.
Annie Dillard
#9. Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.
Annie Dillard
#10. Do women in love feel as men do? Do men love as women love? His virgin bride shared her pipe-frame bed all smiles and laughter. When they were intimate to the last degree on that bed, did Lou's experience join his, did his experience match hers, during this moment and that moment?
Annie Dillard
#11. Those of us who read carried around with us like martyrs a secret knowledge, a secret joy, and a secret hope: There is a life worth living where history is still taking place; there are ideas worth dying for, and circumstances where courage is still prized.
Annie Dillard
#13. Love so sprang at her, she honestly thought no one had ever looked into it. Where was it in literature? Someone would have written something. She must not have recognized it. Time to read everything again.
Annie Dillard
#14. An Eskimo shaman said, "Life's greatest danger lies in the fact that man's food consists entirely of souls".
Annie Dillard
#15. In a dry wind like this, snow and ice can pass directly into the air as a gas without having first melted to water. This process is called sublimation; tonight the snow in the yard and the ice in the creek sublime.
Annie Dillard
#16. Life by its mere appalling length is a feat of endurance for which you haven't the strength.
Annie Dillard
#17. Beauty itself is the fruit of the creator's exuberance....
Annie Dillard
#18. Van Gogh is utterly dead; the world may be fixed, but it never was broken. And shadow itself may resolve into beauty.
Annie Dillard
#19. Every spring he vowed to quit teaching school, and every summer he missed his pupils and searched for them on the streets.
Annie Dillard
#20. How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
Annie Dillard
#21. Unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous.
Annie Dillard
#22. We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence ...
Annie Dillard
#23. I noticed this process of waking, and predicted with terrifying logic that one of these years not far away I would be awake continuously and never slip back, and never be free of myself again.
Annie Dillard
#24. If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?"
"No", said the priest, "not if you did not know."
"Then why," asked the Eskimo earnestly, "did you tell me?
Annie Dillard
#25. The notion of the infinite variety of detail and the multiplicity of forms is a pleasing one; in complexity are the fringes of beauty, and in variety are generosity and exuberance.
Annie Dillard
#26. We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet.
Annie Dillard
#27. Ecstasy, I think, is a soul's response to the waves holiness makes as it nears.
Annie Dillard
#28. According to Inuit culture in Greenland, a person possesses six or seven souls. The souls take the form of tiny people scattered throughout the body.
Annie Dillard
#29. The most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one's own most intimate sensitivity.
Annie Dillard
#30. Books swept me away, this way and that, one after the other; I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them.
Annie Dillard
#31. If I actually believed that the progress of human understanding depended on our crop of contemporary novelists, I would shoot myself.
Annie Dillard
#32. In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers said It is the trade entering his body.
Annie Dillard
#33. An honest work generates its own power; a dishonest work tries to rob power from the cataracts of the given.
Annie Dillard
#34. The dedicated life is worth living. You must give your whole heart to whatever you do.
Annie Dillard
#35. No one can help you if you're stuck in a work. Only you can figure a way out, because only you can see the work's possibilities.
Annie Dillard
#36. Spend the afternoon, you can't take it with you.
Annie Dillard
#37. Matters of taste are not, it turns out, moral issues.
Annie Dillard
#38. The mind itself is an art object ... The mind is a blue guitar on which we improvise the song of the world.
Annie Dillard
#39. The creative process obtains in all creative acts. So if I'm painting suddenly I'll see something that I didn't see before.
Annie Dillard
#40. I suspect that the real moral thinkers end up, wherever they may start, in botany.
Annie Dillard
#41. Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand - that of finding workable compromises between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us.
Annie Dillard
#42. I read with the pure, exhilarating greed of readers sixteen, seventeen years old;
Annie Dillard
#43. We are here to abet creation and to witness it, to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed. Together we notice not only each mountain shadow and each stone on the beach but we notice each other's beautiful face and complex nature so that creation need not play to an empty house.
Annie Dillard
#44. Don't save something good for a later place. Don't hold back from your students, from the poor, don't try to keep anything for yourself 'cause it'll turn to ashes.
Annie Dillard
#46. What is important is the moment of opening a life and feeling it touch
with an electric hiss and cry
this speckled mineral sphere, our present world.
Annie Dillard
#47. All my books started out as extravagant and ended up pure and plain.
Annie Dillard
#48. The courage of children and beasts is a function of innocence.
Annie Dillard
#49. Doing something does not require discipline. It creates its own discipline - with a little help from caffeine.
Annie Dillard
#50. An Inuit hunter asked the local missionary priest: If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell? No, said the priest, not if you did not know. Then why, asked the Inuit earnestly, did you tell me?
Annie Dillard
#51. You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it.
Annie Dillard
#52. I am a fugitive and a vagabond, a sojourner seeking signs.
Annie Dillard
#53. There must be bands of enthusiasts for everything on earth-fanatics who shared a vocabulary, a batch of technical skills and equipment, and, perhaps, a vision of some single slice of the beauty and mystery of things, of their complexity, fascination, and unexpectedness.
Annie Dillard
#54. About five years ago I saw a mockingbird make a straight vertical descent from the roof gutter of a four-story building. It was an act as careless and spontaneous as the curl of a stem or the kindling of a star.
Annie Dillard
#55. In nature, improbabilities are the one stock in trade. The whole creation is one lunatic fringe. If creation had been left up to me, I'm sure I wouldn't have had the imagination or courage to do more than shape a single, reasonably sized atom, smooth as a snowball, and let it go at that.
Annie Dillard
#58. Self-consciousness is the curse of the city and all that sophistication implies.
Annie Dillard
#59. Skin was earth; it was soil. I could see, even on my own skin, the joined trapezoids of dust specks God had wetted and stuck with his spit the morning he made Adam from dirt. Now, all these generations later, we people could still see on our skin the inherited prints of the dust specks of Eden.
Annie Dillard
#60. When I was fifteen, I felt it coming; now I was sixteen, and it hit. My feet had imperceptibly been set on a new path ... there wasn't a whole lot I could do about it, or about anything. I was going to hell on a handcart, that was all, and I knew it and everyone around me knew it, and there it was.
Annie Dillard
#61. Beauty is not a hoax ... Come on, I say to the creek, surprise me; and it does, with each new drop. Beauty is real. I would never deny it; the appalling thing is that I forget it (271).
Annie Dillard
#62. All those things for which we have no words are lost. The mind - the culture - has two little tools, grammar and lexicon: a decorated sand bucket and a matching shovel. With these we bluster about the continents and do all the world's work. With these we try to save our very lives.
Annie Dillard
#63. I'd seen a great many partial eclipses, but a partial eclipse has the same relation to a total eclipse as flirting with a man does to marrying him. It's completely different.
Annie Dillard
#65. I had good innings, as the British say. I wrote for 38 years at the top of my form, and I wanted to quit on a high note.
Annie Dillard
#66. I saw in a blue haze all the world poured flat and pale between the mountains
Annie Dillard
#67. Johnston's books are beautifully written and among the funniest I have ever read.
Annie Dillard
#68. The dear, stupid body is as easily satisfied as a spaniel.
Annie Dillard
#69. Old memories are very easy to get except that once you write about something you've destroyed it.
Annie Dillard
#70. Nothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves.
Annie Dillard
#71. We are here to witness the creation and to abet it.
Annie Dillard
#72. What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.
Annie Dillard
#73. Were the earth smooth, our brains would be smooth as well; we would wake, blink, walk two steps to get the whole picture, and lapse into a dreamless sleep.
Annie Dillard
#74. The obverse of this freedom, of course, is that your work is so meaningless, so fully for yourself alone, and so worthless to the world, that no one except you cares whether you do it well, or ever.
Annie Dillard
#75. People love the good not much less than the beautiful, and the happy as well, or even just the living, for the world of it all, and heart's home.
Annie Dillard
#76. Much has been written about the life of the mind.
Annie Dillard
#77. Landscape consists in the multiple, overlapping intricacies and forms that exist in a given space at a moment in time.
Annie Dillard
#78. What can an artist use but materials, such as they are? What can he light but the short string of his gut, and when that's burnt out, any muck ready to hand?
Annie Dillard
#79. I center down - I retreat, not inside myself, but outside myself. ... Self-forgetfulness is tremendously invigorating. I wonder if we don't waste most of our energy just by spending every waking minute saying hello to ourselves.
Annie Dillard
#80. Time is the continuous loop, the snakeskin with scales endlessly overlapping without beginning or end, or time is an ascending spiral if you will, like a child's toy Slinky.
Annie Dillard
#81. If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed.
Annie Dillard
#82. 'Fecundity' is an ugly word for an ugly subject. It is ugly, at least, in the eggy animal world. I don't think it is for plants.
Annie Dillard
#83. Painters work from the ground up. The latest version of a painting overlays earlier versions, and obliterates them. Writers, on the other hand, work from left to right. The discardable chapters are on the left.
Annie Dillard
#84. Now the thing is no longer a vision: it is paper.
Annie Dillard
#86. It is no less difficult to write a sentence in a recipe than sentences in Moby Dick. So you might as well write Moby Dick.
Annie Dillard
#87. Adverbs are a sign that you've used the wrong verb.
Annie Dillard
#88. It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale.
Annie Dillard
#89. You can serve or you can sing, and wreck your heart in prayer, working the world's hard work.
Annie Dillard
#90. Geography is the key, the crucial accident of birth. A piece of protein could be a snail, a sea lion, or a systems analyst, but it had to start somewhere. This is not science; it is merely metaphor. And the landscape in which the protein "starts" shapes its end as surely as bowls shape water.
Annie Dillard
#91. You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you hear it: There is nothing there ... You feel the world's word as a tension, a hum, a single chorused note everywhere the same. This is it: This hum is the silence.
Annie Dillard
#93. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.
Annie Dillard
#94. I can't dance anymore. Total knee replacements. I can't do anything anymore.
Annie Dillard
#95. I knew well that people could not fly - as well as anyone knows it - but I also knew the kicker: that, as the books put it, with faith all things are possible.
Annie Dillard
#96. The range of rhythms in prose is larger and grander than it is in poetry, and it can handle discursive ideas and plain information as well as character and story. It can do everything. I felt as though I had switched from a single reed instrument to a full orchestra.
Annie Dillard
#97. The dedicated life is the life worth living. You must give with your whole heart.
Annie Dillard
#98. Make connections; let rip; and dance where you can.
Annie Dillard
#99. Fiction keeps its audience by retaining the world as its subject matter. People like the world. Many people actually prefer it to art and spend their days by choice in the thick of it.
Annie Dillard
#100. Why, why in the blue-green world write this sort of thing? Funny written culture, I guess; we pass things on.
Annie Dillard
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