Top 300 Annie Dillard Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Annie Dillard

Featured in: Motivational Quotes, Life Quotes, Time Quotes, Short Inspiring Quotes, Wisdom Quotes

2. “The way you live your days is the way you live your life.”

— Annie Dillard

Featured in: Enjoy Life Quotes, Deep Quotes, Life Is Short Quotes, Thursday Motivational Quotes, Wednesday Inspirational Quotes

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

— Annie Dillard

4. “No one escapes the wilderness on the way to the promised land.”

— Annie Dillard

5. “You can’t test courage cautiously.”

— Annie Dillard

Featured in: Courage Quotes, Boldness Quotes

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

— Annie Dillard

7. “The more you read, the more you will write. The better the stuff you read, the better the stuff you will write.”

— Annie Dillard

8. “An Inuit hunter asked the local missionary priest: If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell? No, said the priest, not if you did not know. Then why, asked the Inuit earnestly, did you tell me?”

— Annie Dillard

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

— Annie Dillard

10. “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

11. “We are here to abet creation and to witness to it, to notice each other’s beautiful face and complex nature so that creation need not play to an empty house.”

— Annie Dillard

12. “Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?”

— Annie Dillard

Featured in: Reading Quotes

13. “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. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book, give it, give it all, give it now.”

— Annie Dillard

14. “The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring.”

— Annie Dillard

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

— Annie Dillard

16. “At a certain point, you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening.”

— Annie Dillard

17. “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.”

— Annie Dillard

18. “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

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

— Annie Dillard

20. “Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.”

— Annie Dillard

21. “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.”

— Annie Dillard

22. “I know only enough of God to want to worship him, by any means ready to hand.”

— Annie Dillard

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

— Annie Dillard

24. “I couldn’t unpeach the peaches.”

— Annie Dillard

25. “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.”

— Annie Dillard

26. “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.”

— Annie Dillard

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

— Annie Dillard

28. “Crystals grew inside rock like arithmetic flowers. They lengthened and spread, added plane to plane in an awed and perfect obedience to an absolute geometry that even stones – maybe only the stones – understood.”

— Annie Dillard

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

— Annie Dillard

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

— Annie Dillard

31. “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

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

— Annie Dillard

33. “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

34. “The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less.”

— Annie Dillard

35. “God gave me a talent to draw. I ‘owed’ it to him to develop the talent.”

— Annie Dillard

36. “Innocence is a better world.”

— Annie Dillard

37. “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.”

— Annie Dillard

38. “Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t affair. A fish flashes, then dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much salt. Deer apparently ascend bodily into heaven; the brightest oriole fades into leaves.”

— Annie Dillard

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

— Annie Dillard

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

— Annie Dillard

41. “Nature’s silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block.”

— Annie Dillard

42. “Experiencing the present purely is being empty and hollow; you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.”

— Annie Dillard

43. “We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all.”

— Annie Dillard

44. “There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.”

— Annie Dillard

45. “Private life, book life, took place where words met imagination without passing through the world.”

— Annie Dillard

46. “Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we sense them.”

— Annie Dillard

47. “Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.”

— Annie Dillard

48. “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

49. “The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.”

— Annie Dillard

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

— Annie Dillard