Top 300 Annie Dillard Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “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.”

— Annie Dillard

104. “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.”

— Annie Dillard

105. “I wake up thinking: What am I reading? What will I read next? I’m terrified that I’ll run out, that I will read through all I want to, and be forced to learn wildflowers at last, to keep awake.”

— Annie Dillard

106. “It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave.”

— Annie Dillard

107. “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.”

— Annie Dillard

108. “For all the insularity of the old guard, Pittsburgh was always an open and democratic town.”

— Annie Dillard

109. “I wake expectant, hoping to see a new thing.”

— Annie Dillard

110. “Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.”

— Annie Dillard

111. “People who take photographs during their whole vacation won’t remember their vacation. They’ll only remember what photographs they took.”

— Annie Dillard

112. “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.”

— Annie Dillard

113. “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.”

— Annie Dillard

114. “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.”

— Annie Dillard

115. “I have to acknowledge that the sea is a cup of death, and the land is a stained altar stone. We the living are survivors huddled on flotsam, living on jetsam. We are escapees. We wake in terror, eat in hunger, sleep with a mouth full of blood.”

— Annie Dillard

116. “Fiction keeps its audience by retaining the world as its subject matter. People like the world. Many people actually prefer it to art and spend their days by choice in the thick of it.”

— Annie Dillard

117. “We are here on the planet only once, and might as well get a feel for the place.”

— Annie Dillard

118. “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.”

— Annie Dillard

119. “When you write, you lay out a line of words. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory.”

— Annie Dillard

120. “What you see in an eclipse is entirely different from what you know. It is especially different for those of us whose grasp of astronomy is so frail that, given a flashlight, a grapefruit, two oranges, and fifteen years, we still could not figure out which way to set the clocks for Daylight Saving Time.”

— Annie Dillard

121. “It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as separating us from our creator, our very self-consciousness, is also the one thing that divides us from our fellow creatures. It was a bitter birthday present from evolution.”

— Annie Dillard

122. “By dipping us children in the Bible so often, they hoped, I think, to give our lives a serious tint, and to provide us with quaintly magnificent snatches of prayer to produce as charms while, say, being mugged for our cash or jewels.”

— Annie Dillard

123. “If I actually believed that the progress of human understanding depended on our crop of contemporary novelists, I would shoot myself.”

— Annie Dillard

124. “Ecstasy, I think, is a soul’s response to the waves holiness makes as it nears.”

— Annie Dillard

125. “Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.”

— Annie Dillard

126. “Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality.”

— Annie Dillard

127. “Nothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves.”

— Annie Dillard

128. “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.”

— Annie Dillard

129. “The Pulitzer is more useful than meaningful.”

— Annie Dillard

130. “Just think: in all the clean, beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a blot; our planet alone has death.”

— Annie Dillard

131. “Are you living just a little and calling that life?”

— Annie Dillard

132. “Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a word to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and delight, the canary that sings on the skull.”

— Annie Dillard

133. “I think that the dying pray at the last not please but thank you, as a guest thanks his host at the door. Falling from airplanes the people are crying thank you, thank you, all down the air; and the cold carriages draw up for them on the rocks.”

— Annie Dillard

134. “What is a house but a bigger skin, and a neighborhood map but the world’s skin ever expanding?”

— Annie Dillard

135. “The courage of children and beasts is a function of innocence.”

— Annie Dillard

136. “Don’t save something good for a later place. Don’t hold back from your students, from the poor, don’t try to keep anything for yourself ’cause it’ll turn to ashes.”

— Annie Dillard

137. “Silence is not our heritage but our destiny; we live where we want to live.”

— Annie Dillard

138. “No, the point is not only does time fly and do we die, but that in these reckless conditions we live at all, and are vouchsafed, for the duration of certain inexplicable moments, to know it.”

— Annie Dillard

139. “Could tiny birds be sifting through me right now, birds winging through the gaps between my cells, touching nothing, but quickening in my tissues, fleet?”

— Annie Dillard

140. “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.”

— Annie Dillard

141. “The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper; I cannot quite make it out.”

— Annie Dillard

142. “Admire the world for never ending on you – as you would an opponent, without taking your eyes away from him, or walking away.”

— Annie Dillard

143. “You adapt yourself, Paul Klee said, to the contents of the paintbox. Adapting yourself to the contents of the paintbox, he said, is more important than nature and its study. The painter, in other words, does not fit the paints to the world. He most certainly does not fit the world to himself. He fits himself to the paint. The self is the servant who bears the paintbox and its inherited contents.”

— Annie Dillard

144. “The written word is weak. Many people prefer life to it. Life gets your blood going, and it smells good. Writing is mere writing, literature is mere.”

— Annie Dillard

145. “Love so sprang at her, she honestly thought no one had ever looked into it. Where was it in literature? Someone would have written something. She must not have recognized it. Time to read everything again.”

— Annie Dillard

146. “I break up through the skin of awareness a thousand times a day, as dolphins burst through seas, and dive again, and rise, and dive.”

— Annie Dillard

147. “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.”

— Annie Dillard

148. “Old memories are very easy to get except that once you write about something you’ve destroyed it.”

— Annie Dillard

149. “The question was not death; living things die. It was love. Not that we died, but what we cared wildly, then deeply, for one person out of billions. We bound ourselves to the fickle, changing, and dying as if they were rock.”

— Annie Dillard

150. “It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale.”

— Annie Dillard