Top 300 Annie Dillard Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.”

— Annie Dillard

252. “If you’re going to publish a book, you probably are going to make a fool of yourself.”

— Annie Dillard

253. “She bade solitude good-bye. Good-bye to no schedule but whim; good-bye to her life among no things but her own and each always in place; good-bye to no real meals, good-bye free thought. The whole fat flock of them flapped away. But what was solitude for if not to foster decency? Her solitude always held open house. when was the last time anyone needed her? She was eager to do it, whatever it was.”

— Annie Dillard

254. “And we the people are so vulnerable. Our bodies are shot with mortality. Our legs are fear and our arms are time. These chill humors seep through our capillaries, weighting each cell with an icy dab of nonbeing, and that dab grows and swells and sucks the cell dry. That is why physical courage is so important – it fills, as it were, the holes – and why it is so invigorating. The least brave act, chance taken and passage won, makes you feel loud as a child.”

— Annie Dillard

255. “At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it.”

— Annie Dillard

256. “I worked so hard all my life, and all I want to do now is read.”

— Annie Dillard

257. “What can an artist use but materials, such as they are? What can he light but the short string of his gut, and when that’s burnt out, any muck ready to hand?”

— Annie Dillard

258. “I have often noticed that these things, which obsess me, neither bother nor impress other people even slightly. I am horribly apt to approach some innocent at a gathering, and like the ancient mariner, fix him with a wild, glitt’ring eye and say, “Do you know that in the head of the caterpillar of the ordinary goat moth there are two hundred twenty-eight separate muscles?” The poor wretch flees. I am not making chatter; I mean to change his life.”

— Annie Dillard

259. “If the sore spot is not fatal, if it does not grow and block something, you can use its power for many years, until the heart resorbs it.”

— Annie Dillard

260. “Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me. This is easy to write, easy to read, and hard to believe... Are my values then so diametrically opposed to those that nature preserves? This is the key point.”

— Annie Dillard

261. “On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away.”

— Annie Dillard

262. “The adult members of society adverted to the Bible unreasonably often. What arcana! Why did they spread this scandalous document before our eyes? If they had read it, I thought, they would have hid it. They didn’t recognize the vivid danger that we would, through repeated exposure, catch a case of its wild opposition to their world.”

— Annie Dillard

263. “Johnston’s books are beautifully written and among the funniest I have ever read.”

— Annie Dillard

264. “I’m getting used to this planet and to this curious human culture which is as cheerfully enthusiastic as it is cheerfully crue.”

— Annie Dillard

265. “Almost all of my many passionate interests, and my many changes of mind, came through books. Books prompted the many vows I made to myself.”

— Annie Dillard

266. “The lenses of telescopes and cameras can no more cover the breadth and scale of the visual array than language can cover the breadth and simultaneity of internal experience.”

— Annie Dillard

267. “If you ask a twenty-one-year-old poet whose poetry he likes, he might say, unblushing, “Nobody’s,” In his youth, he has not yet understood that poets like poetry, and novelists like novels; he himself likes only the role, the thought of himself in a hat.”

— Annie Dillard

268. “The range of rhythms in prose is larger and grander than it is in poetry, and it can handle discursive ideas and plain information as well as character and story. It can do everything. I felt as though I had switched from a single reed instrument to a full orchestra.”

— Annie Dillard

269. “It’s a little silly to finally learn how to write at this age. But I long ago realized I was secretly sincere.”

— Annie Dillard

270. “Only after a writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature. In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers said, “It is the trade entering his body.” The art must enter the body, too.”

— Annie Dillard

271. “The world knew you before you knew the world.”

— Annie Dillard

272. “When I teach, I preach. I thump the Bible. I exhort my students morally. I talk to them about the dedicated life.”

— Annie Dillard

273. “There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading – that is a good life.”

— Annie Dillard

274. “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. This explains why so many books describe the author’s childhood. A writer’s childhood may well have been the occasion of his only firsthand experience.”

— Annie Dillard

275. “The creatures I seek do not want to be seen.”

— Annie Dillard

276. “The novel is a game or joke shared between author and reader.”

— Annie Dillard

277. “I cannot imagine a sorrier pursuit than struggling for years to write a book that attempts to appeal to people who do not read in the first place.”

— Annie Dillard

278. “Why do we lose interest in physical mastery? If I feel like turning cartwheels – and I do – why don’t I learn to turn cartwheels, instead of regretting that I never learned as a child?”

— Annie Dillard

279. “All my books started out as extravagant and ended up pure and plain.”

— Annie Dillard

280. “Now the thing is no longer a vision: it is paper.”

— Annie Dillard

281. “The most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one’s own most intimate sensitivity.”

— Annie Dillard

282. “At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then – and only then – it is handed to you.”

— Annie Dillard

283. “And like Billy Bray, I go my way, and my left foot says “Glory,” and my right foot says “Amen”: in and out of Shadow Creek, upstream and down, exultant, in a daze, dancing, to the twin silver trumpets of praise.”

— Annie Dillard

284. “Why, why in the blue-green world write this sort of thing? Funny written culture, I guess; we pass things on.”

— Annie Dillard

285. “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. Light, be it particle or wave, has force: you can rig a giant sail and go. The secret of seeing is 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

286. “Each thing in the world is translucent.”

— Annie Dillard

287. “You can read in the space of a coffin, and you can write in the space of a toolshed meant for mowers and spades.”

— Annie Dillard

288. “People who read are not too lazy to turn on the television; they prefer books.”

— Annie Dillard

289. “Nobody whispers it in your ear. It is like something you memorized once and forgot. Now it comes back and rips away your breath. You find and finger a phrase at a time; you lay it down cautiously, as if with tongs, and wait suspended until the next one finds you: Ah yes, then this; and yes, praise be, then this.”

— Annie Dillard

290. “In literary history, generation follows generation in a rage.”

— Annie Dillard

291. “It was a clear, picturesque day, a February day without could, without emotion or spirit, like a beautiful women with an empty face.”

— Annie Dillard

292. “Every place you injure adds that patch to your consciousness. You grow more alive.”

— Annie Dillard

293. “The moth’s enormous wings are velveted in a rich, warm, brown, and edged in bands of blue and pink delicate as a watercolour wash. A startling ‘eyespot,’ immense, and deep blue melding to an almost translucent yellow, luxuriates in the centre of each hind wing. The effect is one of a masculine splendour foreign to the butterflies, a fragility unfurled to strength.”

— Annie Dillard

294. “No one knew that ordinary breakfast would be their last. Why not memorize everything, just in case?”

— Annie Dillard

295. “I myself was both observer and observable, and so a possible object of my own humming awareness.”

— Annie Dillard

296. “The feeling that the work is magnificent, and the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged.”

— Annie Dillard

297. “The way to learn about a writer is to read the text. Or texts.”

— Annie Dillard

298. “Under her high brows, she eyed him straight on and straight across. She had gone to girls’ schools, he recalled later. Those girls looked straight at you.”

— Annie Dillard

299. “Our interpreting the universe as an artifact absolutely requires that we posit an author for it, or a celestial fimmaker, dramatist, painter, sculptor, composer, architect, or choreographer. And no one has been willing openly to posit such an artist for the universe since the American transcedentalists and before them the Medieval European philosophers.”

— Annie Dillard

300. “It is a weakening and discoloring idea that rustic people knew God personally once upon a time but that it is too late for us. There never was a more holy age than ours, and never a less. There is no whit less enlightnment under the tree by your street than there was under the Buddha’s bo tree.”

— Annie Dillard