Annie Dillard Quotes

“One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time… give it, give it all, give it now.”

“Eskimo: "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" Priest: "No, not if you did not know." Eskimo: "Then why did you tell me?”

“I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.”

“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.”

“Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.”

“Having chosen this foolishness, I was a free being. How could the world ever stop me, how could I betray myself, if I was not afraid?”

“Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.”

“Admire the world for never ending on you -- as you would an opponent, without taking your eyes away from him, or walking away.”

“I had been chipping at the world idly, and had by accident uncovered vast and labyrinthine further worlds within it.”

“The world which lay under darkness and stillness following the closing of the lid was not the world we know. The event was over. Its devastation lay around about us. The clamoring mind and heart stilled, almost indifferent, certainly disembodied, frail, and exhausted. The hills were hushed, obliterated. Up in the sky, like a crater from some distant cataclysm, was a hollow ring.”

“It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale.”

“She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.”

“I cannot imagine a sorrier pursuit than struggling for years to write a book that attempts to appeal to people who do not read in the first place.”

“Books swept me away, this way and that, one after the other; I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them.”

“I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as a dying friend. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.”

“You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.”

“Spend the afternoon, you can't take it with you.”

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

“He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write. He is careful of what he learns, for that is what he will know.”

“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.”

“The dedicated life is the life worth living. You must give with your whole heart.”

“The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.”

“You can't test courage cautiously, so I ran hard and waved my arms hard, happy.”

“Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?”

“Last forever!' Who hasn't prayed that prayer? You were lucky to get it in the first place. The present is a freely given canvas. That it is constantly being ripped apart and washed downstream goes without saying.”

“We live in all we seek.”

“A schedule defends from chaos and whim. A net for catching days.”

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

“Make connections; let rip; and dance where you can.”

“The real and proper question is: why is it beautiful?”

“I am a fugitive and a vagabond, a sojourner seeking signs.”

“It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.”

“There are no events but thoughts and the heart's hard turning, the heart's slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times.”

“Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand - that of finding workable compromises between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us.”

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and with that one, is what we are doing.”

“I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam.”

“Caring passionately about something isn't against nature, and it isn't against human nature. It's what we're here to do.”

“These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.”

“We are here to witness the creation and to abet it.”

“I alternate between thinking of the planet as home - dear and familiar stone hearth and garden - and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners.”

“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. Then even death, where you're going no matter how you live, cannot you part.”

“Push it. examine all things intensely and relentlessly.”

“There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by.”

“We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence…”

“Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.”

“Whenever there is stillness there is the still small voice, God's speaking from the whirlwind, nature's old song, and dance…”

“I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.”

“if you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not.”

“There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been.”

“I wake up thinking: What am I reading? What will I read next? I'm terrified that I'll run out, that I will read through all I want to, and be forced to learn wildflowers at last, to keep awake.”

“He judged the instant and let go; he flung himself loose into the stars.”

“Whenever a work's structure is intentionally one of its own themes, another of its themes is art.”

“Like any child, I slid into myself perfectly fitted, as a diver meets her reflection in a pool. Her fingertips enter the fingertips on the water, her wrists slide up her arms. The diver wraps herself in her reflection wholly, sealing it at the toes, and wears it as she climbs rising from the pool, and ever after.”

“On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of the conditions. Does anyone 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.”

“Outright predators, of course, I understand. I am among them. There is no denying that the feats of predators can be just as gruesome as those of the unlovely parasites: the swathing and sipping of trapped hummingbirds by barn spiders, the occasional killing and eating of monkeys by chimpanzees. If I were to eat as the delicate ladybug eats, I would go through in just nine days the entire population of Boys Town. Nevertheless, the most rapacious lurk and charge of any predator is not nearly so sinister as the silent hatching of barely visible, implanted eggs. With predators, at least you have a chance.”

“Even such sophisticated mammals as the great predator cats occasionally eat their cubs. A mother cat will be observed licking the area around the umbilical cord of the helpless newborn. She licks, she licks, she licks until something snaps in her brain, and she begins eating, starting there, at the vulnerable belly.”

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. 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. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living. Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern.”

“Any three-year-old can see how unsatisfactory and clumsy is this whole business of reproducing and dying by the billions. We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet. There is not a people in the world that behaves as badly as praying mantises. But wait, you say, there is no right and wrong in nature; right and wrong is a human concept. Precisely: we are moral creatures, then, in an amoral world. The universe that suckled us is a monster that does not care if we live or die—does not care if it itself grinds to a halt. It is fixed and blind, a robot programmed to kill. We are free and seeing; we can only try to outwit it at every turn to save our skins.”