Annie Dillard Quotes

207 Sourced Quotes

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

Annie Dillard
Geography is the key, the crucial accident of birth. A piece of protein could be a snail, a sea lion, or a systems analyst, but it had to start somewhere. This is not science; it is merely metaphor. And the landscape in which the protein "starts" shapes its end as surely as bowls shape water.

Annie Dillard
Fingering insects was touching the rim of nightmare. But you have to study something. I never considered turning away from them just because I was afraid of them.

Annie Dillard
What I call innocence is the spirit's unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once a receptiveness and total concentration.

Annie Dillard
You can serve or you can sing, and wreck your heart in prayer, working the world's hard work.

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

Annie Dillard
You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then-and only then-it is handed to you.

Annie Dillard
On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of the conditions. Does any-one have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. 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 some day and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.

Annie Dillard
Whenever an encounter between a writer of good will and a regular person of good will happens to touch on the subject of writing, each person discovers, dismayed, that good will is of no earthly use. The conversation cannot proceed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
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
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
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
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