Annie Dillard Quotes

207 Sourced Quotes

Whatever may be time de jure, the Astronomer Royal's time is time de facto. His time permeates every corner of physics.

Annie Dillard
Who and of what import were the men whose bones bulk the Great Wall, the thirty million Mao starved, or the thirty million children not yet five who die each year now? Why, they are the insignificant others, of course; living or dead, they are just some of the plentiful others...And you? To what end were we billions of oddballs born?

Annie Dillard
Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a word to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and delight, the canary that sings on the skull.

Annie Dillard
Today is one of those excellent January partly cloudies in which light chooses an unexpected part of the landscape to trick out in gilt, and then the shadow sweeps it away. You know you're alive. You take huge steps, trying to feel the planet's roundness arc between your feet.

Annie Dillard
The sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain. This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is.

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 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
Our life seems cursed to be a wiggle merely, and a wandering without end.

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
When I walk with a camera, I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment's light prints on my own silver gut. When I see this second way I am above all an unscrupulous observer.

Annie Dillard
The faster death goes, the faster evolution goes.

Annie Dillard
We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall.

Annie Dillard
Those of us who read carried around with us like martyrs a secret knowledge, a secret joy, and a secret hope: There is a life worth living where history is still taking place; there are ideas worth dying for, and circumstances where courage is still prized.

Annie Dillard
Catch it if you can. The present is an invisible electron; its lightning path traced faintly on a blackened screen is fleet, and fleeing, and gone.

Annie Dillard
It is inconceivable that we are the heirs of an infinite time of preparation; it is not less inconceivable that there was once a moment with no moment preceding it.

Annie Dillard
The creator is no puritan... There is something that profoundly fails to be exuberant about these crawling, translucent lice and white, fat-bodied grubs, but there is an almost manic exuberance about a creator who turns them out, creature after creature after creature, and sets them buzzing and lurking and flying and flying and swimming about.

Annie Dillard
By dipping us children in the Bible so often, they hoped, I think, to give our lives a serious tint, and to provide us with quaintly magnificent snatches of prayer to produce as charms while, say, being mugged for our cash or jewels.

Annie Dillard
I still try to keep my eyes open. I'm always on the lookout for antlion traps in sandy soil, monarch pupae near milkweed, skipper larvae in locust leaves. These things are utterly common, and I've not seen one

Annie Dillard
Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me. This is easy to write, easy to read, and hard to believe.

Annie Dillard
The general rule in nature is that live things are soft within and rigid without. We vertebrates are living dangerously... like so many peeled trees.

Annie Dillard
Trees have a curious relationship to the subject of the present moment. There are many created things in the universe that outlive us, that outlive the sun, even, but I can't think about them. I live with trees.

Annie Dillard
An Eskimo shaman said, Life's greatest danger lies in the fact that man's food consists entirely of souls.

Annie Dillard
We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up. We teach our children to look alive there, to join by words and activities the life of human culture on the planet

Annie Dillard
There is no whit less enlightenment under the tree by your street than there was under the Buddha's bo tree. I invite you to go sit under that tree by your street.

Annie Dillard
The courage of children and beasts is a function of innocence.

Annie Dillard
Self-consciousness is the curse of the city and all that sophistication implies.

Annie Dillard