Top 300 Annie Dillard Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

202. “The irrational haunts the metaphysical.”

— Annie Dillard

203. “In nature, improbabilities are the one stock in trade. The whole creation is one lunatic fringe. If creation had been left up to me, I’m sure I wouldn’t have had the imagination or courage to do more than shape a single, reasonably sized atom, smooth as a snowball, and let it go at that.”

— Annie Dillard

204. “Buddhism notes that it is always a mistake to think your soul can go it alone.”

— Annie Dillard

205. “I had good innings, as the British say. I wrote for 38 years at the top of my form, and I wanted to quit on a high note.”

— Annie Dillard

206. “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

207. “Whenever an encounter between a writer of good will and a regular person of good will happens to touch on the subject of writing, each person discovers, dismayed, that good will is of no earthly use. The conversation cannot proceed.”

— Annie Dillard

208. “There is always an enormous temptation to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end.”

— Annie Dillard

209. “We are here to abet creation and to witness it, to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed. Together we notice not only each mountain shadow and each stone on the beach but we notice each other’s beautiful face and complex nature so that creation need not play to an empty house.”

— Annie Dillard

210. “I work mornings only. I go out to lunch. Afternoons I play with the baby, walk with my husband, or shovel mail.”

— Annie Dillard

211. “Write about winter in the summer.”

— Annie Dillard

212. “The soul may ask God for anything, and never fail.”

— Annie Dillard

213. “Seeing the open pits in the open air, among farms, is the wonder, and seeing the bodies twist free from the soil. The sight of a cleaned clay soldier upright in a museum case is unremarkable, and this is all that future generations will see. No one will display those men crushed beyond repair; no one will display their loose parts; no one will display them crawling from the walls. Future generations will miss the crucial sight of ourselves as rammed earth.”

— Annie Dillard

214. “It could be that God has absconded but spread, as our vision and understanding of the universe have spread, to a fabric of spirit and sense so grand and subtle, so powerful in a new way, that we can only feel blindly of its hem.”

— Annie Dillard

215. “I used to have a cat, an old fighting tom, who would jump through the open window by my bed in the middle of the night and land on my chest. I’d half-awaken. He’d stick his skull under my nose and purr, stinking of urine and blood. Some nights he kneaded my bare chest with his front paws, powerfully, arching his back, as if sharpening his claws, or pummeling a mother for milk. And some mornings I’d wake in daylight to find my body covered with paw prints in blood; I looked as though I’d been painted with roses.”

— Annie Dillard

216. “Process is nothing; erase your tracks. The path is not the work. I hope your tracks have grown over; I hope birds ate the crumbs; I hope you will toss it all and not look back.”

— Annie Dillard

217. “I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again.”

— Annie Dillard

218. “A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order – willed, faked, and so brought into being.”

— Annie Dillard

219. “If even rock was interesting, if even this ugliness was worth whole shelves at the library, required sophisticated tools to study, and inspired grown men to crack mountains and saw crystals – then what wasn’t?”

— Annie Dillard

220. “You can live as a particle crashing about and colliding in a welter of materials with god, or you can live as a particle crashing about and colliding in a welter of materials without god. But you cannot live outside the welter of colliding materials.”

— Annie Dillard

221. “You are a Seminole alligator wrestler. Half naked, with your two bare hands, you hold and fight a sentence’s head while its tail tries to knock you over.”

— Annie Dillard

222. “Somewhere, and I can’t find where, I read about an Eskimo hunter who 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 Eskimo earnestly, “did you tell me?”

— Annie Dillard

223. “Last forever!? Who hasn’t prayed that prayer? You were lucky to get it in the first place. The present is a freely given canvas. That it is constantly being ripped apart and washed downstream goes without saying.”

— Annie Dillard

224. “I often think of the set pieces of liturgy as certain words which people have successfully addressed to God without their getting killed.”

— Annie Dillard

225. “Van Gogh is utterly dead; the world may be fixed, but it never was broken. And shadow itself may resolve into beauty.”

— Annie Dillard

226. “Even if things are as bad as they could possible be, and as meaningless, then matters of truth are themselves indifferent; we may as well please our sensibilities and, with as much spirit as we can muster, go out with a buck and a wing.”

— Annie Dillard

227. “After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. 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

228. “The mind itself is an art object. It is a Mondrian canvas onto whose homemade grids it fits its own preselected products. Our knowledge is contextual and only contextual. Ordering and invention coincide: we call their collaboration knowledge.”

— Annie Dillard

229. “Like everyone in his right mind, I feared Santa Claus.”

— Annie Dillard

230. “It makes more sense to write one big book – a novel or nonfiction narrative – than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all you possess and learn.”

— Annie Dillard

231. “What is important is the moment of opening a life and feeling it touch – with an electric hiss and cry – this speckled mineral sphere, our present world.”

— Annie Dillard

232. “Novels written with film contracts in mind have a faint but unmistakable, and ruinous, odor.”

— Annie Dillard

233. “What do we ever know that is higher than that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered? Why does death so catch us by surprise, and why love? 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

234. “Martin Buber tells this tale: “Rabbi Mendel once boasted to his teacher Rabbi Elimelekh that evenings he saw the angel who rolls away the light before the darkness, and mornings the angel who rolls away the darkness before the light. ‘Yes,’ said Rabbi Elimelekh, ’in my youth I saw that too. Later on you don’t see these things any more.”

— Annie Dillard

235. “Putting a book together is interesting and exhilarating. It is sufficiently difficult and complex and it engages all your intelligence. It is life at its most free. Your freedom as a writer is not freedom of expression in the sense of wild blurting; you may not let it rip. It is life at its most free, if you are fortunate enough to be able to try it, because you select your materials, invent your task, and pace yourself.”

— Annie Dillard

236. “You can serve or you can sing, and wreck your heart in prayer, working the world’s hard work.”

— Annie Dillard

237. “Writers serve as the memory of a people. They chew over our public past.”

— Annie Dillard

238. “One turns at last even from glory itself with a sigh of relief.”

— Annie Dillard

239. “The thousands of wealth have fallen with wonders, said Rabbi Nathan of Nemirov. Do you find this unclear? It certainly sounds like the sort of thing thousands of wealth do. They fall. Does anyone know what the rabbi meant by wonders?”

— Annie Dillard

240. “Outside shadows are blue, I read, because they are lighted by the blue sky and not the yellow sun. Their blueness bespeaks infinitesimal particles scattered down inestimable distance.”

— Annie Dillard

241. “A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.”

— Annie Dillard

242. “When we lose our innocence – when we start feeling the weight of the atmosphere and learn that there’s death in the pot – we take leave of our sense.”

— Annie Dillard

243. “Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.”

— Annie Dillard

244. “I noticed this process of waking, and predicted with terrifying logic that one of these years not far away I would be awake continuously and never slip back, and never be free of myself again.”

— Annie Dillard

245. “When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it? But the world without light is wasteland and chaos, and a life without sacrifice is abomination.”

— Annie Dillard

246. “I like the slants of light; I’m a collector.”

— Annie Dillard

247. “I’m a housewife: I spend far more time on housework than anything else.”

— Annie Dillard

248. “You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it to the page. The page is jealous and tyrannical; the page is made of time and matter; the page always wins.”

— Annie Dillard

249. “The death of self of which the great writers speak is no violent act. It is merely the joining of the great rock heart of the earth in its roll. It is merely the slow cessation of the will’s spirits and the intellect’s chatter: it is waiting like a hollow bell with a stilled tongue. Fuge, tace, quiesce. The waiting itself is the thing.”

— Annie Dillard

250. “Writing every book, the writer must solve two problems: Can it be done? and, Can I do it? Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.”

— Annie Dillard