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Annie Dillard Quotes

Annie Dillard is an American author, best known for her narrative prose in both fiction and non-fiction. She has published works of poetry, essays, prose, and literary criticism, as well as two novels and one memoir. Her 1974 work Pilgrim at Tinker Creek won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. From 1980, Dillard taught for 21 years in the English department of Wesleyan University, in Middletown, Connecticut. Wikipedia  

✵ 30. April 1945  •  Other names アニー・ディラード, انی دیلارد
Annie Dillard photo

Works

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
The Living
The Living
Annie Dillard
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
The Living
The Living
Annie Dillard
Annie Dillard: 63 quotes8 likes

Famous Annie Dillard Quotes

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

Annie Dillard

Source: " The Writing Life http://www.tikkun.org/mediagallery/download.php?mid=20090505114218282" (link is to PDF download), Tikkun magazine, Volume 3, Number 6, 1988

“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.”

Annie Dillard

“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?”

Annie Dillard

“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.”

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

Source: Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

“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.”

Annie Dillard

Source: The Writing Life

Annie Dillard Quotes about the world

“The world is wider in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain and Lazarus.”

Annie Dillard book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Source: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“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?”

Annie Dillard

Source: An American Childhood

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

Annie Dillard

Source: The Writing Life

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

Annie Dillard

Source: An American Childhood

“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.”

Annie Dillard

" Total Eclipse https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/08/annie-dillards-total-eclipse/536148/", Teaching a Stone to Talk (1982)

Annie Dillard Quotes about books

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

Annie Dillard book The Living

Source: The Living

“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.”

Annie Dillard book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Source: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

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

Annie Dillard book The Living

Source: The Living

“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.”

Annie Dillard

Source: The Writing Life

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

Annie Dillard

“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.”

Annie Dillard

Source: The Writing Life

Annie Dillard: Trending quotes

“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 book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Source: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

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

Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard Quotes

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

Annie Dillard book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Source: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“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.”

Annie Dillard

Source: The Writing Life

“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

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

Annie Dillard

Source: An American Childhood

“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.”

Annie Dillard book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Source: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“We live in all we seek.”

Annie Dillard

Source: For the Time Being

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

Annie Dillard

Source: The Writing Life

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

Annie Dillard book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Source: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

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

Annie Dillard

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

Annie Dillard book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Source: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“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.”

Annie Dillard

Source: Holy the Firm (1977)

“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.”

Annie Dillard

Source: Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

“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.”

Annie Dillard

Source: The Writing Life

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

Annie Dillard

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

Annie Dillard book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Source: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

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

Annie Dillard

Source: Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

“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.”

Annie Dillard

Source: Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

“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.”

Annie Dillard

Source: Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

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

Annie Dillard

Source: The Writing Life

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

Annie Dillard book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Source: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

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

Annie Dillard

Source: The Writing Life

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

Annie Dillard

Source: Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

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

Annie Dillard

Source: Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

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

Annie Dillard

Source: For the Time Being

“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.”

Annie Dillard

“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.”

Annie Dillard book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Source: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

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

Annie Dillard

Quoted by Ted Nelson in Literary Machines (1982)

“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.”

Annie Dillard

An American Childhood (1987)

“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.”

Annie Dillard

"An Expedition to the Pole", Teaching a Stone to Talk (1982)

“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.”

Annie Dillard book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

"The Horns of the Altar", pp. 237–238
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1976)

“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.”

Annie Dillard book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

"Fecundity", p. 171
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1976)

“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.”

Annie Dillard

The Writing Life (1989)

“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.”

Annie Dillard

" The Force That Drives the Flower https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1973/11/the-force-that-drives-the-flower/308963/", The Atlantic, Nov. 1973

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