Annie Dillard Quotes: top 100 famous quotes about Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard Quotes & Sayings

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We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us. — Annie Dillard

Nature's silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block. — Annie Dillard

You can't test courage cautiously. (Annie Dillard) — Marcia Quinn Noren

I didn't cry, because, actually, I was an intercontinental ballistic missile, with an atomic warhead; they don't cry. Why — Annie Dillard

We wake, if ever at all, to mystery. — Annie Dillard

Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff. — Annie Dillard

The world knew you before you knew the world. — Annie Dillard

The way to learn about a writer is to read the text. Or texts. — Annie Dillard

I had hopes for my rough edges. I wanted to use them as a can opener, to cut myself a hole in the world's surface and exit through it. — Annie Dillard

Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we sense them. — Annie Dillard

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

The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all. — Annie Dillard

Self-consciousness is the curse of the city and all that sophistication implies. — Annie Dillard

How you spend your days is how you spend your life. — Annie Dillard

Time is the warp and matter the weft of the woven texture of beauty in space, and death is the hurling shuttle. — Annie Dillard

I think the dying pray at the last not "please," but "thank you," as a guest thanks his host at the door. — Annie Dillard

Matters of taste are not, it turns out, moral issues. — Annie Dillard

We live in all we seek. — Annie Dillard

When I teach, I preach. I thump the Bible. I exhort my students morally. I talk to them about the dedicated life. — Annie Dillard

The point of going somewhere like the Napo River in Ecuador is not to see the most spectacular anything. It is simply to see what is there. — Annie Dillard

People who read are not too lazy to turn on the television; they prefer books. — Annie Dillard

We are here on the planet only once, and might as well get a feel for the place. — Annie Dillard

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

There was real beauty to the old idea of living and dying where you were born. — Annie Dillard

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

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

Push it. examine all things intensely and relentlessly. — Annie Dillard

He judged the instant and let go; he flung himself loose into the stars. — Annie Dillard

Write about winter in the summer. — Annie Dillard

So live. I'll be the nun for you. I am now. — Annie Dillard

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

I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames. — Annie Dillard

It is the beginning of a work that the writer throws away. — Annie Dillard

The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. — Annie Dillard

The way we live our days, is the way we live our lives. — Annie Dillard

Silence is not our heritage but our destiny; we live where we want to live. — Annie Dillard

1. Only a total unself-consciousness will permit me to live with myself (202). — Annie Dillard

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

The dedicated life is the life worth living. You must give with your whole heart. — Annie Dillard

If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed. — Annie Dillard

'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

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

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

Writers serve as the memory of a people. They chew over our public past. — Annie Dillard

We are here to witness the creation and to abet it. — Annie Dillard

How can people think that artists seek a name? There is no such thing as an artist - only the world, lit or unlit, as the world allows. — Annie Dillard

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

You do what you do out of your private love of the thing itself. — Annie Dillard

I know only enough of God to want to worship him, by any means ready to hand. — Annie Dillard

I would like to learn, or remember, how to live. — Annie Dillard

We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all. — Annie Dillard

Caring passionately about something isn't against nature, and it isn't against human nature. It's what we're here to do. — Annie Dillard

Van Gogh is utterly dead; the world may be fixed, but it never was broken. And shadow itself may resolve into beauty. — Annie Dillard

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

Johnston's books are beautifully written and among the funniest I have ever read. — Annie Dillard

Spend the afternoon, you can't take it with you. — Annie Dillard

The interior life is often stupid. — Annie Dillard

I read with the pure, exhilarating greed of readers sixteen, seventeen years old; — Annie Dillard

She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live. — Annie Dillard

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

He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write. He is careful of what he learns, for that is what he will know. — Annie Dillard

You can't test courage cautiously. — Annie Dillard

I write in my own journal when something extraordinary or funny happens. And there's some nice imagery in there. I don't think of what to do with it. — Annie Dillard

Write as if you were dying. — Annie Dillard

I can't dance anymore. Total knee replacements. I can't do anything anymore. — Annie Dillard

Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world. — Annie Dillard

I could very calmly go wild. — Annie Dillard

It's a little silly to finally learn how to write at this age. But I long ago realized I was secretly sincere. — Annie Dillard

Just think: in all the clean, beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a blot; our planet alone has death. — Annie Dillard

God gave me a talent to draw. I 'owed' it to him to develop the talent. — Annie Dillard

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

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

I work mornings only. I go out to lunch. Afternoons I play with the baby, walk with my husband, or shovel mail. — Annie Dillard

To dust is only to forestall burial — Annie Dillard

This hospital, like every other, is a hole in the universe through which holiness issues in blasts. It blows both ways, in and out of time. — Annie Dillard

The courage of children and beasts is a function of innocence. — Annie Dillard

Every spring he vowed to quit teaching school, and every summer he missed his pupils and searched for them on the streets. — Annie Dillard

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

For all the insularity of the old guard, Pittsburgh was always an open and democratic town. — Annie Dillard

I worked so hard all my life, and all I want to do now is read. — Annie Dillard

Why, why in the blue-green world write this sort of thing? Funny written culture, I guess; we pass things on. — Annie Dillard

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

We still and always want waking. — Annie Dillard

I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck. — Annie Dillard

We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall. — Annie Dillard

Old memories are very easy to get except that once you write about something you've destroyed it. — Annie Dillard

Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac. — Annie Dillard

Buddhism notes that it is always a mistake to think your soul can go it alone. — Annie Dillard

Admire the world for never ending on you
as you would an opponent, without taking your eyes away from him, or walking away. — Annie Dillard

The dear, stupid body is as easily satisfied as a spaniel. — Annie Dillard

The way you live your days is the way you live your life. — Annie Dillard

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

I saw in a blue haze all the world poured flat and pale between the mountains — Annie Dillard

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

The general rule in nature is that live things are soft within and rigid without. — Annie Dillard

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

Nothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves. — Annie Dillard

Cruelty is a mystery, and a waste of pain. — Annie Dillard

The soul may ask God for anything, and never fail. — Annie Dillard

I couldn't unpeach the peaches. — Annie Dillard