Top 300 Annie Dillard Quotes (2024 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, Wisdom Quotes, Travel Quotes

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

— Annie Dillard

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

6. “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

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

— Annie Dillard

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

— Annie Dillard

9. “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

10. “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

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

— Annie Dillard

13. “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

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

— Annie Dillard

15. “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

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

— Annie Dillard

17. “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

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. “I couldn’t unpeach the peaches.”

— Annie Dillard

22. “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

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

— Annie Dillard

24. “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

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

— Annie Dillard

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

— Annie Dillard

27. “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

28. “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

29. “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

30. “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

31. “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

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

— Annie Dillard

33. “Innocence is a better world.”

— Annie Dillard

34. “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

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

— Annie Dillard

36. “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

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

— Annie Dillard

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

— Annie Dillard

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

— Annie Dillard

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

— Annie Dillard

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

— Annie Dillard

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

— Annie Dillard

43. “The creative process obtains in all creative acts. So if I’m painting suddenly I’ll see something that I didn’t see before.”

— Annie Dillard

44. “I’d seen a great many partial eclipses, but a partial eclipse has the same relation to a total eclipse as flirting with a man does to marrying him. It’s completely different.”

— Annie Dillard

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

— Annie Dillard

46. “Time is the warp and matter the weft of the woven texture of beauty in space, and death is the hurling shuttle.”

— Annie Dillard

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

— Annie Dillard

48. “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

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

— Annie Dillard

50. “The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest.”

— Annie Dillard