Top 300 Annie Dillard Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Private life, book life, took place where words met imagination without passing through the world.”

— Annie Dillard

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

— Annie Dillard

53. “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

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

— Annie Dillard

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

— Annie Dillard

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

— Annie Dillard

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

— Annie Dillard

58. “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

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

— Annie Dillard

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

— Annie Dillard

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

— Annie Dillard

62. “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

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

— Annie Dillard

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

— Annie Dillard

65. “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

66. “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

67. “The interior life is often stupid.”

— Annie Dillard

68. “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

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

— Annie Dillard

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

— Annie Dillard

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

— Annie Dillard

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

— Annie Dillard

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

— Annie Dillard

74. “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

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

— Annie Dillard

76. “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

77. “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

78. “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

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

— Annie Dillard

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

— Annie Dillard

81. “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

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

— Annie Dillard

83. “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

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

— Annie Dillard

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

— Annie Dillard

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

— Annie Dillard

87. “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

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

— Annie Dillard

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

— Annie Dillard

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

— Annie Dillard

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

— Annie Dillard

92. “Then why did you tell me?”

— Annie Dillard

93. “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

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

— Annie Dillard

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

— Annie Dillard

96. “Painters work from the ground up. The latest version of a painting overlays earlier versions, and obliterates them. Writers, on the other hand, work from left to right. The discardable chapters are on the left.”

— Annie Dillard

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

— Annie Dillard

98. “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

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

— Annie Dillard

100. “I have since only rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam.”

— Annie Dillard