Annie Dillard Quotes

207 Sourced Quotes

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?

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

Annie Dillard
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, and that with extravagance goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives.

Annie Dillard
Nature seems to exult in abounding radicality, extremism, anarchy. If we were to judge nature by its common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed. In nature, improbabilities are the one stock in trade. The whole creation is one lunatic fringe.... No claims of any and all revelations could be so far-fetched as a single giraffe.

Annie Dillard
It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping God may wake someday and take offense, or the waking God may draw us out to where we can never return.

Annie Dillard
The notion of novelist as gifted savage dies hard... if Faulkner was a man of letters like thee and me, why have we not written great novels?

Annie Dillard
The absolute is available to everyone in every age. There never was a more holy age than ours, and never a less.

Annie Dillard
The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and fleet.

Annie Dillard
This is your life. You are a Seminole alligator wrestler. Half naked, with your two bare hands, you hold and fight a sentence's head while its tail tries to knock you over.

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
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.

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

Annie Dillard
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
There is a terrible innocence in the benumbed world of the lower animals, reducing life there to a universal chomp.

Annie Dillard
In any attempt to bridge the domains of experience belonging to the spiritual and physical sides of our nature, time occupies the key position.

Annie Dillard
I feel as though I stand at the foot of an infinitely high staircase, down which some exuberant spirit is flinging tennis ball after tennis ball, eternally, and the one thing I want in the world is a tennis ball.

Annie Dillard
The world did not have me in mind; it had no mind. It was a coincidental collection of things and people, of items, an I myself was one such item...the things in the world did not necessarily cause my overwhelming feelings; the feelings were inside me, beneath my skin, behind my ribs, withing my skull. They were even, to some extent, under my control.

Annie Dillard
I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you.

Annie Dillard
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
There are no events but thoughts and the heart's hard turning, the heart's slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times.

Annie Dillard
When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner's pick, a woodcarver's gouge, a surgeon's probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you will find yourself deep in new territory.

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

Annie Dillard
Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.

Annie Dillard
Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?

Annie Dillard
What is a house but a bigger skin, and a neighborhood map but the world's skin ever expanding?

Annie Dillard