Annie Dillard Quotes

207 Sourced Quotes

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

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
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
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 blinded note of the ten thousand things, the whine of wings. You take a step in the right direction to pray to this silence, and even to address the prayer to "World." Distinctions blur. Quit your tents. Pray without ceasing.

Annie Dillard
The novel is a game or joke shared between author and reader.

Annie Dillard
Einstein likened the generation of a new idea to a chicken's laying an egg: "Kieks — auf einmal is es da." Cheep — and all at once it is there. Of course, Einstein was not above playing to the crowd.

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
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
Time was a hook in his mouth. Time was reeling him in jaw first; it was reeling him in, headlong and breathless, to a shore he had not known was there.

Annie Dillard
Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?

Annie Dillard
Out of a human population on earth of four and a half billion, perhaps twenty people can write a book in a year. Some people lift cars, too. Some people enter week-long sled-dog races, go over Niagara Falls in a barrel, fly planes through the Arc de Triomphe. Some people feel no pain in childbirth. Some people eat cars. There is no call to take human extremes as norms.

Annie Dillard
Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading — that is a good life.

Annie Dillard
Novels written with film contracts in mind have a faint but unmistakable, and ruinous, odor.

Annie Dillard
The chief danger memoirists face is starring in their own stories, and becoming fascinated.

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

Annie Dillard
Overhead some white puffed clouds sped, and threw their blue shadows up the leafy stumps where the hops grew, and threw the shadows down the stumps' other sides and into the woods fast as snakes.

Annie Dillard
It should surprise no one that the life of the writer — such as it is — is colorless to the point of sensory deprivation. Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.

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

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

Annie Dillard
The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside by a generous hand. But- and this is the point- who gets excited by a mere penny? But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days.

Annie Dillard
Skin was earth; it was soil. I could see, even on my own skin, the joined trapezoids of dust specks God had wetted and stuck with his spit the morning he made Adam from dirt. Now, all these generations later, we people could still see on our skin the inherited prints of the dust specks of Eden.

Annie Dillard
It makes more sense to write one big book - a novel or nonfiction narrative - than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all you possess and learn.

Annie Dillard
The present is the wave that explodes over my head, flinging the air with particles at the height of its breathless unroll; it is the live water and light that bears from undisclosed sources the freshest news, renewed and renewing, world without end.

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
He had vowed long ago, and renewed his vow frequently, that if holding hands in a circle and singing hymns, as it were, was what it took to make life endurable, he would rather die.

Annie Dillard
The seasons pitched and heaved a man from rail to rail, from weather side to lee side and back, and a lunatic hogged the helm. Shall these bones remember?

Annie Dillard
The blinding sway of their inner lives makes children immoral.

Annie Dillard
Why did I have to keep learning this same thing over and over?

Annie Dillard