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

Annie Dillard
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
You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you hear it: There is nothing there...You feel the world's word as a tension, a hum, a single chorused note everywhere the same. This is it: This hum is the silence.

Annie Dillard
Pittsburgh wasn't really Andrew Carnegie's town. We just thought it was. Steel wasn't the only major industry in Pittsburgh. We just had to think to recall the others.

Annie Dillard
A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.

Annie Dillard
Every day is a god, each day is a god, and holiness holds forth in time.

Annie Dillard
She realized that the dying must often feel this way — steaming along just fine, while on ahead someone has torn up the rails.

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
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
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 the wear out their brains learning what folks expect, and spend their strength trying to rise over those same folks.

Annie Dillard
I am sorry I ran from you. I am still running, running from that knowledge, that eye, that love from which there is no refuge. For you meant only love, and love, and I felt only fear, and pain. So once in Israel love came to us incarnate, stood in the doorway between two worlds, and we were all afraid.

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
Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now.... Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.

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 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
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.

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
The second before the sun went out we saw a wall of dark shadow come speeding at us. We no sooner saw it than it was upon us, like thunder.... It was as if an enormous, loping god in the sky had reached down and slapped the earth's face.

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

Annie Dillard
I felt time in full stream, and I felt consciousness in full stream joining it, like the rivers.

Annie Dillard
We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet.

Annie Dillard
Could two live that way? Could two live under the wild rose, and explore by the pond, so that the smooth mind of each is as everywhere present to the other, and as received and as unchallenged, as falling snow?

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

Annie Dillard
She never believed that 'nothing could be done.' Something could always be done; that is what people were for.

Annie Dillard
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.

Annie Dillard
The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper; I cannot quite make it out.

Annie Dillard
You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it.

Annie Dillard