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. What geomancy reads what the windblown sand writes on the desert rock? I read there that all things live by a generous power and dance to a mighty tune; or I read there all things are scattered and hurled, that our every arabesque and grand jete is a frantic variation on our one free fall.
Annie Dillard
#5. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading
that is a good life. A day that closely resembles every other day of the past ten or twenty years does not suggest itself as a good one. But who would not call Pasteur's life a good one, or Thomas Mann's?
Annie Dillard
#6. 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
#7. I set up and staged hundreds of ends-of-the-world and watched, enthralled, as they played themselves out.
Annie Dillard
#8. At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it.
Annie Dillard
#9. No one escapes the wilderness on the way to the promised land.
Annie Dillard
#10. When we lose our innocence - when we start feeling the weight of the atmosphere and learn that there's death in the pot - we take leave of our sense.
Annie Dillard
#11. Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don't affair. A fish flashes, then dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much salt. Deer apparently ascend bodily into heaven; the brightest oriole fades into leaves.
Annie Dillard
#12. Society places the writer so far beyond the pale that society does not regard the writer at all.
Annie Dillard
#13. There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been.
Annie Dillard
#14. No, the point is not only does time fly and do we die, but that in these reckless conditions we live at all, and are vouchsafed, for the duration of certain inexplicable moments, to know it.
Annie Dillard
#15. 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
#16. The impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes. - Annie Dillard
Austin Kleon
#17. You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then-and only then-it is handed to you.
Annie Dillard
#19. There was real beauty to the old idea of living and dying where you were born.
Annie Dillard
#20. I had been chipping at the world idly, and had by accident uncovered vast and labyrinthine further worlds within it.
Annie Dillard
#21. Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me. This is easy to write, easy to read, and hard to believe.
Annie Dillard
#22. I'm getting used to this planet and to this curious human culture which is as cheerfully enthusiastic as it is cheerfully crue
Annie Dillard
#23. 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.
Annie Dillard
#24. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.
Annie Dillard
#25. If even rock was interesting, if even this ugliness was worth whole shelves at the library, required sophisticated tools to study, and inspired grown men to crack mountains and saw crystals
then what wasn't?
Annie Dillard
#26. Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.
Annie Dillard
#27. Nature's silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block.
Annie Dillard
#28. God gave me a talent to draw. I 'owed' it to him to develop the talent.
Annie Dillard
#29. Look upstream. Just simply turn around; have you no will?
Annie Dillard
#30. Time is the warp and matter the weft of the woven texture of beauty in space, and death is the hurling shuttle.
Annie Dillard
#31. The world is wider in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain and Lazarus.
Annie Dillard
#32. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.
Annie Dillard
#33. Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a word to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and delight, the canary that sings on the skull.
Annie Dillard
#34. I'm a housewife: I spend far more time on housework than anything else.
Annie Dillard
#36. The silence is all there is. It is the alpha and the omega. It is God's brooding over the face of the waters; it is the blended note of the ten thousand things, the whine of wings.
Annie Dillard
#37. If, as Heraclitus suggests, god, like an oracle, neither "declares nor hides, but sets forth by signs," then clearly I had better be scrying the signs.
Annie Dillard
#38. Our life seems cursed to be a wiggle merely, and a wandering without end.
Annie Dillard
#40. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet.
Annie Dillard
#41. Aim for the chopping block. If you aim for the wood, you will have nothing. Aim past the wood, aim through the wood; aim for the chopping block.
Annie Dillard
#42. Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.
Annie Dillard
#43. 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
#44. 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
#46. Only after a writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature. 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." The art must enter the body, too.
Annie Dillard
#48. 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
#49. Young children have no sense of wonder. They bewilder well, but few things surprise them. All of it is new to young children, after all, and equally gratuitous.
Annie Dillard
#50. An Eskimo shaman said, "Life's greatest danger lies in the fact that man's food consists entirely of souls".
Annie Dillard
#51. I think science works the way a tightrope walker works: by not looking at its feet. As soon as it looks at its feet, it realizes its operating in midair.
Annie Dillard
#52. Whenever there is stillness there is the still small voice, God's speaking from the whirlwind, nature's old song, and dance ...
Annie Dillard
#53. The body of literature, with its limits and edges, exists outside some people and inside others. Only after the writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature.
Annie Dillard
#54. I think the dying pray at the last not "please," but "thank you," as a guest thanks his host at the door.
Annie Dillard
#55. By dipping us children in the Bible so often, they hoped, I think, to give our lives a serious tint, and to provide us with quaintly magnificent snatches of prayer to produce as charms while, say, being mugged for our cash or jewels.
Annie Dillard
#56. The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest.
Annie Dillard
#57. Buddhism notes that it is always a mistake to think your soul can go it alone.
Annie Dillard
#58. 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
#59. Life by its mere appalling length is a feat of endurance for which you haven't the strength.
Annie Dillard
#60. When I teach, I preach. I thump the Bible. I exhort my students morally. I talk to them about the dedicated life.
Annie Dillard
#61. Eskimo: "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" Priest: "No, not if you did not know." Eskimo: "Then why did you tell me?
Annie Dillard
#62. Beauty itself is the fruit of the creator's exuberance....
Annie Dillard
#63. 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.
Annie Dillard
#64. Van Gogh is utterly dead; the world may be fixed, but it never was broken. And shadow itself may resolve into beauty.
Annie Dillard
#65. Every spring he vowed to quit teaching school, and every summer he missed his pupils and searched for them on the streets.
Annie Dillard
#66. The universe is illusion merely, not one speck of it real, and we are not only its victims, falling always into or smashed by a planet slung by the sun-but also its captives, bound by the mineral-made ropes of our senses.
Annie Dillard
#67. The way you live your days is the way you live your life.
Annie Dillard
#68. The painter ... does not fit the paints to the world. He most certainly does not fit the world to himself. He fits himself to the paint. The self is the servant who bears the paintbox and its inherited contents.
Annie Dillard
#70. How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
Annie Dillard
#71. 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
#72. We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence ...
Annie Dillard
#73. 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
#74. Flung is too harsh a word for the rush of the world. Blown is more like it, but blown by a generous, unending breath.
Annie Dillard
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. I wake up thinking: What am I reading? What will I read next? I'm terrified that I'll run out, that I will read through all I want to, and be forced to learn wildflowers at last, to keep awake.
Annie Dillard
#78. It could be that God has absconded but spread, as our vision and understanding of the universe have spread, to a fabric of spirit and sense so grand and subtle, so powerful in a new way, that we can only feel blindly of its hem.
Annie Dillard
#79. We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet.
Annie Dillard
#80. Does anything eat flowers. I couldn't recall having seen anything eat a flower - are they nature's privileged pets?
Annie Dillard
#81. Ecstasy, I think, is a soul's response to the waves holiness makes as it nears.
Annie Dillard
#82. Nothing rose to plug the gap, to address what some called "ultimate concerns," unless you count the arts, the arts that lacked both epistemological methods and accountability, and that drew nutty people, or drove them nuts.
Annie Dillard
#83. The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.
Annie Dillard
#84. He judged the instant and let go; he flung himself loose into the stars.
Annie Dillard
#85. I want to climb up the blank blue dome as a man would storm the inside of a circus tent, wildly, dangling, and with a steel knife claw a rent in the top, peep, and, if I must, fall.
Annie Dillard
#86. You have to take pains in a memoir not to hang on the reader's arm, like a drunk, and say, 'And then I did this and it was so interesting.
Annie Dillard
#87. 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
#88. How loose he seemed to himself, under the stars! The spaces between the stars were pores, out of which human meaning evaporated.
Annie Dillard
#89. 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
#90. He is careful of what he reads, for this is what he will write. He is careful of what he learns, as this is what he will know.
Annie Dillard
#91. I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.
Annie Dillard
#92. 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
#93. If I actually believed that the progress of human understanding depended on our crop of contemporary novelists, I would shoot myself.
Annie Dillard
#94. 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.
Annie Dillard
#95. 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
#96. One turns at last even from glory itself with a sigh of relief.
Annie Dillard
#97. An honest work generates its own power; a dishonest work tries to rob power from the cataracts of the given.
Annie Dillard
#98. It is a weakening and discoloring idea that rustic people knew God personally once upon a time but that it is too late for us. There never was a more holy age than ours, and never a less. There is no whit less enlightnment under the tree by your street than there was under the Buddha's bo tree.
Annie Dillard
#99. There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.
Annie Dillard
#100. At night I read and write, and things I have never understood become clear; I reap the harvest of the rest of the year's planting
Annie Dillard
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