Annie Dillard Quotes (43 Quotes)


    Crystals grew inside rock like arithmetic flowers. They lengthened and spread, added plane to plane in an awed and perfect obedience to an absolute geometry that even stones - maybe only the stones - understood.

    People love pretty much the same things best. A writer looking for subject inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.

    Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.

    It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as separating us from our creator, our very self-consciousness, is also the one thing that divides us from our fellow creatures. It was a bitter birthday present from evolution.

    Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.


    There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable.

    As a life's work, I would remember everything - everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net.

    Somewhere, and I can't find where, I read about an Eskimo hunter who 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

    Just once I wanted a task that required all the joy I had. Day after day I had noticed that if I waited long enough, my strong unexpressed joy would dwindle and dissipate inside me, like a fire subsiding . . . . Just this once I wanted to let it rip.


    I don't know what it is about fecundity that so appalls. I suppose it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonishingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful . . .

    No child on earth was ever meant to be ordinary, and you can see it in them, and they know it, too, but then the times get to them, and they wear out their brains learning what folks expect, and spend their strength trying to rise over those same folks.

    Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.

    I read about an Eskimo hunter who 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 Eskimo earnestly, did you tell me.

    I startled a weasel who startled me, and we exchanged a long glance. . . . Our eyes locked, and someone threw away the key.

    A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.

    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.

    We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence.

    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.

    There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.

    The sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain. This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is.

    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?"

    Experiencing the present purely is being empty and hollow you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.

    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.

    It could be that our faithlessness is a cowering cowardice born of our very smallness, a massive failure of imagination. . . . If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed.

    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.

    I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again.

    Nature is, above all, profligate. Don't believe them when they tell you how economical and thrifty nature is, whose leaves return to the soil. Wouldn't it be cheaper to leave them on the tree in the first place.

    Does anything eat flowers. I couldn't recall having seen anything eat a flower are they nature's privileged pets.

    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.

    Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.

    I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.

    I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too.

    I think the dying pray at the last not please but thank you as a guest thanks his host at the door

    The secret of seeing is to sail on solar wind. Hone and spread your spirit, till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.

    I woke at intervals until . . . the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not.

    The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.

    As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.

    There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by.

    The writer studies literature, not the world. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write.


    How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

    Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you.


    More Annie Dillard Quotations (Based on Topics)


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