Explore a treasure trove of wisdom and insight from Annie Dillard through their most impactful and thought-provoking quotes and sayings. Broaden your horizons with their inspiring words and share these beautiful quote pictures from Annie Dillard with your friends and followers on popular social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blog - all free of charge. Delve into our collection of the top 203 Annie Dillard quotes, handpicked for you to discover and share with others.

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

We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us. By Annie Dillard

We are here to witness the creation and to abet it. By Annie Dillard

Every spring he vowed to quit teaching school, and every summer he missed his pupils and searched for them on the streets. By Annie Dillard

I work mornings only. I go out to lunch. Afternoons I play with the baby, walk with my husband, or shovel mail. By Annie Dillard

For all the insularity of the old guard, Pittsburgh was always an open and democratic town. By Annie Dillard

God gave me a talent to draw. I 'owed' it to him to develop the talent. By Annie Dillard

Nothing on earth is more gladdening than knowing we must roll up our sleeves and move back the boundaries of the humanly possible once more. By Annie Dillard

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

The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest. By Annie Dillard

Why, why in the blue-green world write this sort of thing? Funny written culture, I guess; we pass things on. By Annie Dillard

If the sore spot is not fatal, if it does not grow and block something, you can use its power for many years, until the heart resorbs it. By 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. By Annie Dillard

I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again. By 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. By Annie Dillard

As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker. By Annie Dillard

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

I can't dance anymore. Total knee replacements. I can't do anything anymore. By 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. By Annie Dillard

I didn't cry, because, actually, I was an intercontinental ballistic missile, with an atomic warhead; they don't cry. Why By Annie Dillard

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

Am I living?' ... I forgot myself, and sank into dim and watery oblivion. By Annie Dillard

This hospital, like every other, is a hole in the universe through which holiness issues in blasts. It blows both ways, in and out of time. By Annie Dillard

Old memories are very easy to get except that once you write about something you've destroyed it. By Annie Dillard

Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world. By Annie Dillard

Nature's silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block. By Annie Dillard

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

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

I write in my own journal when something extraordinary or funny happens. And there's some nice imagery in there. I don't think of what to do with it. By Annie Dillard

People love the good not much less than the beautiful, and the happy as well, or even just the living, for the world of it all, and heart's home. By Annie Dillard

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

I know only enough of God to want to worship him, by any means ready to hand. By Annie Dillard

Just think: in all the clean, beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a blot; our planet alone has death. By 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. By Annie Dillard

So live. I'll be the nun for you. I am now. By Annie Dillard

Whenever there is stillness there is the still small voice, God's speaking from the whirlwind, nature's old song, and dance ... By Annie Dillard

The world knew you before you knew the world. By Annie Dillard

I read with the pure, exhilarating greed of readers sixteen, seventeen years old; By Annie Dillard

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

I would like to learn, or remember, how to live. By Annie Dillard

We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all. By Annie Dillard

You can read in the space of a coffin, and you can write in the space of a toolshed meant for mowers and spades. By Annie Dillard

Like everyone in his right mind, I feared Santa Claus. By Annie Dillard

It was a clear, picturesque day, a February day without could, without emotion or spirit, like a beautiful women with an empty face. By Annie Dillard

The point of going somewhere like the Napo River in Ecuador is not to see the most spectacular anything. It is simply to see what is there. By Annie Dillard

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

Life by its mere appalling length is a feat of endurance for which you haven't the strength. By Annie Dillard

The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all. By Annie Dillard

Doing something does not require discipline. It creates its own discipline - with a little help from caffeine. By Annie Dillard

You can't test courage cautiously, so I ran hard and waved my arms hard, happy. By Annie Dillard

You can't test courage cautiously. By Annie Dillard

Flung is too harsh a word for the rush of the world. Blown is more like it, but blown by a generous, unending breath. By Annie Dillard

The irrational haunts the metaphysical. By Annie Dillard

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? By Annie Dillard

Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we sense them. By Annie Dillard

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. By Annie Dillard

The way to learn about a writer is to read the text. Or texts. By Annie Dillard

The writer studies literature, not the world. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write. By Annie Dillard

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

She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live. By Annie Dillard

The way we live our days, is the way we live our lives. By Annie Dillard

Beauty itself is the fruit of the creator's exuberance.... By Annie Dillard

Van Gogh is utterly dead; the world may be fixed, but it never was broken. And shadow itself may resolve into beauty. By Annie Dillard

The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. By Annie Dillard

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

When I teach, I preach. I thump the Bible. I exhort my students morally. I talk to them about the dedicated life. By Annie Dillard

The mind wants the world to return its love, or its awareness; the mind wants to know all the world, and all eternity, and God. By Annie Dillard

The novel is a game or joke shared between author and reader. By Annie Dillard

I'm a housewife: I spend far more time on housework than anything else. By Annie Dillard

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

If you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not. By Annie Dillard

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

Experiencing the present purely is being emptied and hollow; you catch the grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall. By Annie Dillard

You have to take pains in a memoir not to hang on the reader's arm, like a drunk, and say, 'And then I did this and it was so interesting. By Annie Dillard

Our family was on the lunatic fringe. My mother was always completely irrepressible. My father made crowd noises into a microphone. By Annie Dillard

Johnston's books are beautifully written and among the funniest I have ever read. By Annie Dillard

When we lose our innocence - when we start feeling the weight of the atmosphere and learn that there's death in the pot - we take leave of our sense. By Annie Dillard

They dissolved when I tried to inspect them, or dimmed, or slid dizzyingly away, like a ship's stern yawing down the dark lee slope of a wave. By Annie Dillard

No one can help you if you're stuck in a work. Only you can figure a way out, because only you can see the work's possibilities. By Annie Dillard

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

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

It's a little silly to finally learn how to write at this age. But I long ago realized I was secretly sincere. By 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 By Annie Dillard

I wake expectant, hoping to see a new thing. By Annie Dillard

In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers said It is the trade entering his body. By Annie Dillard

What is a house but a bigger skin, and a neighborhood map but the world's skin ever expanding? By Annie Dillard

Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles. By Annie Dillard

Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair. By Annie Dillard

No one ever said it would be easy By Annie Dillard

We are here on the planet only once, and might as well get a feel for the place. By Annie Dillard

Writers serve as the memory of a people. They chew over our public past. By Annie Dillard

I had good innings, as the British say. I wrote for 38 years at the top of my form, and I wanted to quit on a high note. By Annie Dillard

Ecstasy, I think, is a soul's response to the waves holiness makes as it nears. By Annie Dillard

Admire the world for never ending on you as you would an opponent, without taking your eyes away from him, or walking away. By 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. By Annie Dillard

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. By Annie Dillard

Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark. By Annie Dillard

Aim for the chopping block. If you aim for the wood, you will have nothing. Aim past the wood, aim through the wood; aim for the chopping block. By Annie Dillard

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

There was real beauty to the old idea of living and dying where you were born. By Annie Dillard

Put yourself out of your misery. By Annie Dillard

Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic. By Annie Dillard

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

Make connections; let rip; and dance where you can. By Annie Dillard

1. Only a total unself-consciousness will permit me to live with myself (202). By Annie Dillard

I like the slants of light; I'm a collector. By Annie Dillard

Then why did you tell me? By Annie Dillard

Novels written with film contracts in mind have a faint but unmistakable, and ruinous, odor. By Annie Dillard

Almost all of my many passionate interests, and my many changes of mind, came through books. Books prompted the many vows I made to myself. By Annie Dillard

The dedicated life is the life worth living. You must give with your whole heart. By Annie Dillard

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

I couldn't unpeach the peaches. By Annie Dillard

Look upstream. Just simply turn around; have you no will? By Annie Dillard

I could very calmly go wild. By Annie Dillard

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. By Annie Dillard

There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind. By Annie Dillard

We live in all we seek. By Annie Dillard

People who read are not too lazy to turn on the television; they prefer books. By Annie Dillard

The way you live your days is the way you live your life. By Annie Dillard

It is the beginning of a work that the writer throws away. By Annie Dillard

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. By Annie Dillard

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

This is a spendthrift economy; though nothing is lost, all is spent. By Annie Dillard

No one escapes the wilderness on the way to the promised land. By Annie Dillard

An honest work generates its own power; a dishonest work tries to rob power from the cataracts of the given. By Annie Dillard

I'm getting used to this planet and to this curious human culture which is as cheerfully enthusiastic as it is cheerfully crue By Annie Dillard

It is everlastingly funny that the proud, metaphysically ambitious, clamoring mind will hush if you give it an egg. By Annie Dillard

It is no less difficult to write a sentence in a recipe than sentences in Moby Dick. So you might as well write Moby Dick. By Annie Dillard

If you're going to publish a book, you probably are going to make a fool of yourself. By Annie Dillard

We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence ... By Annie Dillard

I think the dying pray at the last not "please," but "thank you," as a guest thanks his host at the door. By Annie Dillard

'Fecundity' is an ugly word for an ugly subject. It is ugly, at least, in the eggy animal world. I don't think it is for plants. By Annie Dillard

I am a fugitive and a vagabond, a sojourner seeking signs. By Annie Dillard

The secret of seeing is to sail on solar wind. By Annie Dillard

All my books started out as extravagant and ended up pure and plain. By Annie Dillard

Write as if you are dying. By Annie Dillard

We still and always want waking. By Annie Dillard

People who take photographs during their whole vacation won't remember their vacation. They'll only remember what photographs they took. By Annie Dillard

Write as if you were dying. By Annie Dillard

Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. By Annie Dillard

We still & always want waking. By Annie Dillard

He judged the instant and let go; he flung himself loose into the stars. By Annie Dillard

The dedicated life is worth living. You must give your whole heart to whatever you do. By Annie Dillard

I worked so hard all my life, and all I want to do now is read. By Annie Dillard

Private life, book life, took place where words met imagination without passing through the world. By Annie Dillard

What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color. By Annie Dillard

Buddhism notes that it is always a mistake to think your soul can go it alone. By Annie Dillard

Push it. examine all things intensely and relentlessly. By Annie Dillard

I set up and staged hundreds of ends-of-the-world and watched, enthralled, as they played themselves out. By Annie Dillard

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

The creatures I seek do not want to be seen. By Annie Dillard

Write about winter in the summer. By Annie Dillard

How you spend your days is how you spend your life. By Annie Dillard

Matters of taste are not, it turns out, moral issues. By Annie Dillard

The creative process obtains in all creative acts. So if I'm painting suddenly I'll see something that I didn't see before. By Annie Dillard

Anything can happen, and anything does; By Annie Dillard

Dan Gerber is one of our finest living poets. By Annie Dillard

Why did I have to keep learning this same thing over and over? By Annie Dillard

The soul may ask God for anything, and never fail. By Annie Dillard

When I first read the words 'introvert' and 'extrovert' when I was 10, I thought I was both. By Annie Dillard

I woke at intervals until ... the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not. By Annie Dillard

I suspect that the real moral thinkers end up, wherever they may start, in botany. By Annie Dillard

There is always an enormous temptation to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. By Annie Dillard

The more you read, the more you will write. The better the stuff you read, the better the stuff you will write. By Annie Dillard

The interior life is often stupid. By Annie Dillard

The surest sign of age is loneliness. By Annie Dillard

If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed. By Annie Dillard

One turns at last even from glory itself with a sigh of relief. By Annie Dillard

The mind itself is an art object ... The mind is a blue guitar on which we improvise the song of the world. By Annie Dillard

Spend the afternoon, you can't take it with you. By Annie Dillard

To dust is only to forestall burial By Annie Dillard

How loose he seemed to himself, under the stars! The spaces between the stars were pores, out of which human meaning evaporated. By Annie Dillard

Landscape consists in the multiple, overlapping intricacies and forms that exist in a given space at a moment in time. By Annie Dillard

I smelled silt on the wind, turkey, laundry, leaves ... my God what a world. There is no accounting for one second of it (267). By Annie Dillard

Your feelings are none of your business. By Annie Dillard

Are you living just a little and calling that life? By Annie Dillard

The mind of the writer does indeed do something before it dies, and so does its owner, but I would be hard put to call it living. By Annie Dillard

How can people think that artists seek a name? There is no such thing as an artist - only the world, lit or unlit, as the world allows. By Annie Dillard

We wake, if ever at all, to mystery. By Annie Dillard

Where is privacy, if not in the mind? By Annie Dillard

Adverbs are a sign that you've used the wrong verb. By Annie Dillard

Does anything eat flowers. I couldn't recall having seen anything eat a flower - are they nature's privileged pets? By Annie Dillard

You do what you do out of your private love of the thing itself. By Annie Dillard

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. By Annie Dillard

Now the thing is no longer a vision: it is paper. By Annie Dillard

According to Inuit culture in Greenland, a person possesses six or seven souls. The souls take the form of tiny people scattered throughout the body. By Annie Dillard

As a life's work, I would remember everything - everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net. By Annie Dillard

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

The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper; I cannot quite make it out. By Annie Dillard

The dear, stupid body is as easily satisfied as a spaniel. By Annie Dillard

Innocence is a better world. By Annie Dillard

He is careful of what he reads, for this is what he will write. He is careful of what he learns, as this is what he will know. By Annie Dillard

On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away. By Annie Dillard

Society places the writer so far beyond the pale that society does not regard the writer at all. By Annie Dillard

The general rule in nature is that live things are soft within and rigid without. By Annie Dillard

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

Cruelty is a mystery, and a waste of pain. By Annie Dillard

Much has been written about the life of the mind. By Annie Dillard

The Pulitzer is more useful than meaningful. By Annie Dillard

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

Lick a finger: feel the now. By Annie Dillard

A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order - willed, faked, and so brought into being. By Annie Dillard