Top 300 Annie Dillard Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

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

— Annie Dillard

54. “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

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

— Annie Dillard

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

— Annie Dillard

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

— Annie Dillard

58. “As a life’s work, I would remember everything – everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net.”

— Annie Dillard

59. “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

60. “Your feelings are none of your business.”

— Annie Dillard

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

— Annie Dillard

62. “If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldn’t believe the world existed.”

— Annie Dillard

63. “Then why did you tell me?”

— Annie Dillard

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

— Annie Dillard

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

— Annie Dillard

66. “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

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

— Annie Dillard

68. “I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again.”

— Annie Dillard

69. “The universe is illusion merely, not one speck of it real, and we are not only its victims, falling always into or smashed by a planet slung by the sun-but also its captives, bound by the mineral-made ropes of our senses.”

— Annie Dillard

70. “The interior life is often stupid.”

— Annie Dillard

71. “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

72. “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.”

— Annie Dillard

73. “Dan Gerber is one of our finest living poets.”

— Annie Dillard

74. “Doing something does not require discipline. It creates its own discipline – with a little help from caffeine.”

— Annie Dillard

75. “I can’t dance anymore. Total knee replacements. I can’t do anything anymore.”

— Annie Dillard

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

— Annie Dillard

77. “An Eskimo shaman said, Life’s greatest danger lies in the fact that man’s food consists entirely of souls.”

— Annie Dillard

78. “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

79. “Divinity is not playful. The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensibl e earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and fleet. There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see.”

— Annie Dillard

80. “Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.”

— Annie Dillard

81. “I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too.”

— Annie Dillard

82. “There is no whit less enlightenment under the tree by your street than there was under the Buddha’s bo tree. I invite you to go sit under that tree by your street.”

— Annie Dillard

83. “Trees have a curious relationship to the subject of the present moment. There are many created things in the universe that outlive us, that outlive the sun, even, but I can’t think about them. I live with trees.”

— Annie Dillard

84. “I think the dying pray at the last not “please,” but “thank you,” as a guest thanks his host at the door.”

— Annie Dillard

85. “Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.”

— Annie Dillard

86. “But enough is enough. One turns at last even from glory itself with a sigh of relief. From the depths of mystery, and even from the heights of splendor, we bounce back and hurry for the latitudes of home.”

— Annie Dillard

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

— Annie Dillard

88. “Adverbs are a sign that you’ve used the wrong verb.”

— Annie Dillard

89. “What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?”

— Annie Dillard

90. “I still try to keep my eyes open. I’m always on the lookout for antlion traps in sandy soil, monarch pupae near milkweed, skipper larvae in locust leaves. These things are utterly common, and I’ve not seen one.”

— Annie Dillard

91. “I saw in a blue haze all the world poured flat and pale between the mountains.”

— Annie Dillard

92. “Mountains are giant, restful, absorbent. You can heave your spirit into a mountain and the mountain will keep it, folded, and not throw it back as some creeks will. The creeks are the world with all its stimulus and beauty; I live there. But the mountains are home.”

— Annie Dillard

93. “Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.”

— Annie Dillard

94. “What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.”

— Annie Dillard

95. “You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then-and only then-it is handed to you.”

— Annie Dillard

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

— Annie Dillard

97. “But there is another kind of seeing that involves a letting go. When I see this way I sway transfixed and emptied. The difference between the two ways of seeing is the difference between walking with and without a camera. When I walk with a camera I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment’s light prints on my own silver gut. When I see this second way I am above all an unscrupulous observer.”

— Annie Dillard

98. “Our family was on the lunatic fringe. My mother was always completely irrepressible. My father made crowd noises into a microphone.”

— Annie Dillard

99. “We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up. We teach our children to look alive there, to join by words and activities the life of human culture on the planet.”

— Annie Dillard

100. “When I first read the words ‘introvert’ and ‘extrovert’ when I was 10, I thought I was both.”

— Annie Dillard