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

Annie Dillard Quotes #2428
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #7098
#3. You do what you do out of your private love of the thing itself.

Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard Quotes #17281
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #21664
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #23689
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #24817
#7. I set up and staged hundreds of ends-of-the-world and watched, enthralled, as they played themselves out.

Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard Quotes #26911
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #26922
#9. No one escapes the wilderness on the way to the promised land.

Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard Quotes #30458
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #31303
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #32391
#12. Society places the writer so far beyond the pale that society does not regard the writer at all.

Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard Quotes #34380
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #46292
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #49164
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #61096
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #62142
#17. You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then-and only then-it is handed to you.

Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard Quotes #66654
#18. Put yourself out of your misery.

Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard Quotes #73318
#19. There was real beauty to the old idea of living and dying where you were born.

Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard Quotes #83158
#20. I had been chipping at the world idly, and had by accident uncovered vast and labyrinthine further worlds within it.

Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard Quotes #93062
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #100592
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #108429
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #113263
#24. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.

Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard Quotes #132519
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #151531
#26. Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.

Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard Quotes #160745
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #164225
#28. God gave me a talent to draw. I 'owed' it to him to develop the talent.

Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard Quotes #169998
#29. Look upstream. Just simply turn around; have you no will?

Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard Quotes #176534
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #188071
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #197624
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #203055
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #212666
#34. I'm a housewife: I spend far more time on housework than anything else.

Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard Quotes #225339
#35. The creatures I seek do not want to be seen.

Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard Quotes #227218
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #236842
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #242111
#38. Our life seems cursed to be a wiggle merely, and a wandering without end.

Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard Quotes #245477
#39. We live in all we seek.

Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard Quotes #245816
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #250652
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #253830
#42. Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.

Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard Quotes #265440
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #266480
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #276098
#45. To dust is only to forestall burial

Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard Quotes #291796
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #311910
#47. I couldn't unpeach the peaches.

Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard Quotes #314437
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #314558
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #315019
#50. An Eskimo shaman said, "Life's greatest danger lies in the fact that man's food consists entirely of souls".

Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard Quotes #315387
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #323716
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #325495
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #334288
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #336146
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #336347
#56. The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest.

Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard Quotes #356996
#57. Buddhism notes that it is always a mistake to think your soul can go it alone.

Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard Quotes #362456
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #373488
#59. Life by its mere appalling length is a feat of endurance for which you haven't the strength.

Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard Quotes #375559
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #380243
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #382486
#62. Beauty itself is the fruit of the creator's exuberance....

Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard Quotes #388579
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #392416
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #397139
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #398365
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #399534
#67. The way you live your days is the way you live your life.

Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard Quotes #421031
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #432395
#69. You can't test courage cautiously. (Annie Dillard)

Marcia Quinn Noren

Annie Dillard Quotes #433166
#70. How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard Quotes #444283
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #444908
#72. We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence ...

Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard Quotes #445950
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #446846
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #448563
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #449750
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #452226
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #452852
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #458535
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #461343
#80. Does anything eat flowers. I couldn't recall having seen anything eat a flower - are they nature's privileged pets?

Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard Quotes #470525
#81. Ecstasy, I think, is a soul's response to the waves holiness makes as it nears.

Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard Quotes #473984
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #483535
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #488256
#84. He judged the instant and let go; he flung himself loose into the stars.

Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard Quotes #489118
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #505004
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #511577
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #530087
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #535885
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #543423
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #545856
#91. I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.

Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard Quotes #550062
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #550675
#93. If I actually believed that the progress of human understanding depended on our crop of contemporary novelists, I would shoot myself.

Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard Quotes #553126
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #558817
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #559994
#96. One turns at last even from glory itself with a sigh of relief.

Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard Quotes #560477
#97. An honest work generates its own power; a dishonest work tries to rob power from the cataracts of the given.

Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard Quotes #562076
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #562923
#99. There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.

Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard Quotes #566069
#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

Annie Dillard Quotes #574217

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