Top 300 Annie Dillard Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

152. “Self-consciousness is the curse of the city and all that sophistication implies.”

— Annie Dillard

153. “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

154. “We still and always want waking. We should amass half dressed in long lines like tribesmen and shake gourds at each other, to wake up; instead we watch television and miss the show.”

— Annie Dillard

155. “We can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience – even of silence – by choice. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting. A weasel doesn’t “attack” anything; a weasel lives as he’s meant to, yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity.”

— Annie Dillard

156. “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

Featured in: Reading Quotes

157. “The dear, stupid body is as easily satisfied as a spaniel.”

— Annie Dillard

158. “Does anything eat flowers. I couldn’t recall having seen anything eat a flower – are they nature’s privileged pets?”

— Annie Dillard

159. “You quit your house and country, quit your ship, and quit your companions in the tent, saying, “I am just going outside and may be some time.” The light on the far side of the blizzard lures you. You walk, and one day you enter the spread heart of silence, where lands dissolve and seas become vapor and ices sublime under unknown stars. This is the end of the Via Negativa, the lightless edge where the slopes of knowledge dwindle, and love for its own sake, lacking an object, begins.”

— Annie Dillard

160. “Young children have no sense of wonder. They bewilder well, but few things surprise them. All of it is new to young children, after all, and equally gratuitous.”

— Annie Dillard

161. “I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam. It is possible, in deep space, to sail on solar wind. Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.”

— Annie Dillard

162. “The point of going somewhere like the Napo River in Ecuador is not to see the most spectacular anything. It is simply to see what is there.”

— Annie Dillard

163. “Landscape consists in the multiple, overlapping intricacies and forms that exist in a given space at a moment in time.”

— Annie Dillard

164. “I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as a dying friend. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.”

— Annie Dillard

165. “All those things for which we have no words are lost. The mind – the culture – has two little tools, grammar and lexicon: a decorated sand bucket and a matching shovel. With these we bluster about the continents and do all the world’s work. With these we try to save our very lives.”

— Annie Dillard

166. “I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you’re going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles.”

— Annie Dillard

167. “I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you.”

— Annie Dillard

168. “Could two live that way? Could two live under the wild rose, and explore by the pond, so that the smooth mind of each is as everywhere present to the other, and as received and as unchallenged, as falling snow?”

— Annie Dillard

169. “Cruelty is a mystery, and a waste of pain.”

— Annie Dillard

170. “The fixed is the world without fire- dead flint, dead tinder, and nowhere a spark. It is motion without direction, force without power, the aimless procession of caterpillars round the rim of a vase, and I hate it because at any moment I myself might step to that charmed and glistening thread.”

— Annie Dillard

171. “Here is the fringey edge where elements meet and realms mingle, where time and eternity spatter each other with foam.”

— Annie Dillard

172. “We live in all we seek.”

— Annie Dillard

173. “There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind. On a sunny day, the sun’s energy on a square acre of land or pond can equal 4500 horsepower. These “horses” heave in every direction, like slaves building pyramids, and fashion, from the bottom up, a new and sturdy world.”

— Annie Dillard

174. “But shadows spread, and deepened, and stayed. After thousands of years we’re still strangers to darkness, fearful aliens in an enemy camp with our arms crossed over our chests.”

— Annie Dillard

175. “He judged the instant and let go; he flung himself loose into the stars.”

— Annie Dillard

176. “Write as if you are dying.”

— Annie Dillard

177. “It should surprise no one that the life of the writer – such as it is – is colorless to the point of sensory deprivation. Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.”

— Annie Dillard

178. “Every spring he vowed to quit teaching school, and every summer he missed his pupils and searched for them on the streets.”

— Annie Dillard

179. “Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand – that of finding workable compromises between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us.”

— Annie Dillard

180. “About five years ago I saw a mockingbird make a straight vertical descent from the roof gutter of a four-story building. It was an act as careless and spontaneous as the curl of a stem or the kindling of a star.”

— Annie Dillard

181. “Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.”

— Annie Dillard

182. “We still and always want waking.”

— Annie Dillard

183. “I could very calmly go wild.”

— Annie Dillard

184. “There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world lit or unlit as the light allows. When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it?”

— Annie Dillard

185. “I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers.”

— Annie Dillard

186. “The surest sign of age is loneliness.”

— Annie Dillard

187. “The sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain. This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is.”

— Annie Dillard

188. “Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation’s short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit.”

— Annie Dillard

189. “So live. I’ll be the nun for you. I am now.”

— Annie Dillard

190. “You do what you do out of your private love of the thing itself.”

— Annie Dillard

191. “What I call innocence is the spirit’s unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once a receptiveness and total concentration.”

— Annie Dillard

192. “Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what’s going on here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise.”

— Annie Dillard

193. “Why didn’t someone hand those newly sighted people paints and brushes from the start, when they still didn’t know what anything was? Then maybe we all could see color-patches too, the world unraveled from reason, Eden before Adam gave names. The scales would drop from my eyes; I’d see trees like men walking; I’d run down the road against all orders, allowing and leaping.”

— Annie Dillard

194. “As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.”

— Annie Dillard

195. “These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.”

— Annie Dillard

196. “The body of literature, with its limits and edges, exists outside some people and inside others. Only after the writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature.”

— Annie Dillard

197. “A shepherd on a hilltop who looks at a mess of stars and thinks, ‘There’s a hunter, a plow, a fish,’ is making mental connections that have as much real force in the universe as the very fires in those stars themselves.”

— Annie Dillard

198. “I want to climb up the blank blue dome as a man would storm the inside of a circus tent, wildly, dangling, and with a steel knife claw a rent in the top, peep, and, if I must, fall.”

— Annie Dillard

199. “I feel as though I stand at the foot of an infinitely high staircase, down which some exuberant spirit is flinging tennis ball after tennis ball, eternally, and the one thing I want in the world is a tennis ball.”

— Annie Dillard

200. “I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend. During visiting hours, I enter its room with dread and sympathy for its many disorders. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.”

— Annie Dillard