Annie Dillard Quotes

207 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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
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
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
Through the tall window by her cot she saw two blue shadows slide down Chuckanut Ridge quick as otters, but she could not see the clouds that made them.

Annie Dillard
The writer... is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write.

Annie Dillard
Time is the continuous loop, the snakeskin with scales endlessly overlapping without beginning or end, or time is an ascending spiral if you will, like a child's toy Slinky. Of course we have no idea which arc on the loop is our time, let alone where the loop itself is, so to speak, or down whose lofty flight of stairs the Slinky so uncannily walks

Annie Dillard
It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as separating us from our creator — our very self-consciousness — is also the one thing that divides us from our fellow creatures. It was a bitter birthday present from evolution.

Annie Dillard
Time expanded. The day widened, pulled from both ends by the shrinking dark, as if darkness itself were a pair of hands and daylight a skein between them, a flexible membrane, and the hands that had pressed together all winter — praying, paralyzed with foreboding — now flung open wide.

Annie Dillard
At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it.

Annie Dillard
Why do people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?

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 mind wants to live forever, or to learn a very good reason why not. The mind wants the world to return its love, or its awareness... The mind's sidekick, however, will settle for two eggs over easy. The dear, stupid body is easily satisfied as a spaniel. And, incredibly, the simple spaniel can lure the brawling mind to its dish. It is everlastingly funny that the proud, metaphysically ambitious mind will hush if you give it an egg.

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
Divinity is not playful. The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensibl e earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and fleet. There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see.

Annie Dillard
The universe is illusion merely, not one speck of it real, and we are not only its victims, falling always into or smashed by a planet slung by the sun-but also its captives, bound by the mineral-made ropes of our senses.

Annie Dillard
Just once I wanted a task that required all the joy I had. Day after day I had noticed that if I waited long enough, my strong unexpressed joy would dwindle and dissipate inside me, like a fire subsiding.... Just this once I wanted to let it rip.

Annie Dillard
The great thing about time is that it goes on.

Annie Dillard
What I sought in books was imagination. It was depth, depth of thought and feeling; some sort of extreme of subject matter; some nearness to death; some call to courage. I myself was getting wild; I wanted wildness, originality, genius, rapture, hope.... What I sought in books was a world whose surfaces, whose people and events and days lived, actually matched the exaltation of the interior life. There you could live.

Annie Dillard
Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him, or as flying in an airplane does to falling out of an airplane.

Annie Dillard
Our minds are immediately aware of a "flight of time" without the intervention of external senses.

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
Write about winter in the summer. Describe Norway as Ibsen did, from a desk in Italy; describe Dublin as James Joyce did, from a desk in Paris. Willa Cather wrote her prairie novels in New York City; Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn in Hartford, Connecticut. Recently, scholars learned that Walt Whitman rarely left his room.

Annie Dillard
Nature will try anything once. This is what the sign of the insects says. If you're dealing with organic compounds, then let them combine. If it works, if it quickens, set it clacking in the grass; there's always room for one more.

Annie Dillard
If I actually believed that the progress of human understanding depended on our crop of contemporary novelists, I would shoot myself.

Annie Dillard
The point of the dragonfly's terrible lip, the giant water bug, birdsong, or the beautiful dazzle and flash of sunlighted minnows,is not that it all fits together like clockwork--for it doesn'tbut that it all flows so freely wild, like the creek, that it all surges in such a free, finged tangle. Freedom is the world's water and weather, the world's nourishment freely given, its soil and sap: and the creator loves pizzazz.

Annie Dillard
About five years ago I saw a mockingbird make a straight vertical descent from the roof gutter of a four-story building. It was an act as careless and spontaneous as the curl of a stem or the kindling of a star.

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

Annie Dillard