Annie Dillard Quotes & Sayings

I worked so hard all my life, and all I want to do now is read. — Annie Dillard

Are you living just a little and calling that life? — Annie Dillard

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

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. It is 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. "The most demanding part of living a lifetimes as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one's own most intimate sensitivity." Anne Truitt, the sculptor, said this. Thoreau said it another way: know your own bone. "Pursue, keep up with, circle round and round your life ... Know your own bone: gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw at it still. — Annie Dillard

The silence is all there is. It is the alpha and the omega. It is God's brooding over the face of the waters; it is the blended note of the ten thousand things, the whine of wings. — Annie Dillard

Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we sense them. — Annie Dillard

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

As symbol, or as the structuring of symbols, art can render intelligible
or at least visible, at least discussible
those wilderness regions which philosophy has abandoned and those hazardous terrains where science's tools do not fit. I mean the rim of knowledge where language falters; and I mean all those areas of human experience, feeling, and thought about which we care so much and know so little: the meaning of all we see before us, of our love for each other, and the forms of freedom in time, and power, and destiny, and all whereof we imagine: grace, perfection, beauty, and the passage of all materials to thoughts, and of all ideas to forms. — Annie Dillard

The way you live your days is the way you live your life. — Annie Dillard

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

The mind wants to live forever, or to learn a very good reason why not. The mind wants the world to return its love, or its awareness ... The mind's sidekick, however, will settle for two eggs over easy. The dear, stupid body is easily satisfied as a spaniel. And, incredibly, the simple spaniel can lure the brawling mind to its dish. It is everlastingly funny that the proud, metaphysically ambitious mind will hush if you give it an egg. — Annie Dillard

1. Only a total unself-consciousness will permit me to live with myself (202). — Annie Dillard

So the Midwest nourishes us [ ... ] and presents us with the spectacle of a land and a people completed and certain. And so we run to our bedrooms and read in a fever, and love the big hardwood trees outside the windows, and the terrible Midwest summers, and the terrible Midwest winters [ ... ]. And so we leave it sorrowfully, having grown strong and restless by opposing with all our will and mind and muscle its simple, loving, single will for us: that we stay, that we stay and find a place among its familiar possibilities. Mother knew we would go; she encouraged us. — Annie Dillard

You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it. — Annie Dillard

I am a sacrifice bound with cords to the horns of the world's rock altar, waiting for worms. I take a deep breath, I open my eyes. Looking, I see there are worms in the horns of the altar like live maggots in amber, there are shells of worms in the rock and moths flapping at my eyes. A wind from no place rises. A sense of the real exults me; the cords loosen: I walk on my way. — Annie Dillard

That it's rough out there and chancy is no surprise. Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac. But at the same time we are also created. In the Koran, Allah asks "the heaven and the earth, and all in between, thinkest thou I made them in jest?" It's a good question. What do we think of the created universe, spanning an unthinkable void with an unthinkable profusion of forms? Or what do we think of nothingness, those sickening reaches of time in either direction? If the giant water bug was not made in jest, was it then made in earnest? — Annie Dillard

A man who struggles long to pray and study Torah will be able to discover the sparks of divine light in all of creation, in each solitary bush and grain and woman and man. And when he cleaves strenuously to God for many years, he will be able to release the sparks to unwrap and lift these particular shreds of holiness, and return them to God. This is the human task: to direct and channel the spark's return. This task is tikkun, restoration.
Yours is a holy work on earth right now, they say, whatever that work is if you tie your love and desire to God. You do not deny or flee the world, but redeem it, all of it - just as it is. — Annie Dillard

In Highland New Guinea, now Popua New Guinea, a British district officer named James Taylor contacted a mountain village, above three thousand feet, whose tribe had never seen any trace of the outside world. It was the 1930s. He described the courage of one villager. One day, on the airstrip hacked from the mountains near his village, this man cut vines and lashed himself to the fuselage of Taylor's airplane shortly before it took off. He explained calmly to his loved ones that, no matter what happened to him, he had to see where it came from. — Annie Dillard

I'd seen a great many partial eclipses, but a partial eclipse has the same relation to a total eclipse as flirting with a man does to marrying him. It's completely different. — Annie Dillard

I would like to learn, or remember, how to live. — Annie Dillard

Johnston's books are beautifully written and among the funniest I have ever read. — Annie Dillard

To dust is only to forestall burial — Annie Dillard

An acre of poppies and a forest of spruce boggle no one's mind. Even ten square miles of wheat gladdens the hearts of most ... No, in the plant world, and especially among the flowering plants, fecundity is not an assault on human values. Plants are not our competitors; they are our prey and our nesting materials. We are no more distressed at their proliferation than an owl is at a population explosion among field mice ... but in the animal world things are different, and human feelings are different ... Fecundity is anathema only in the animal. "Acres and acres of rats" has a suitably chilling ring to it that is decidedly lacking if I say, instead, "acres and acres of tulips". — Annie Dillard

I like to be aware of a book as a piece of writing, and aware of its structure as a product of mind, and yet I want to be able to see the represented world through it. I admire artists who succeed in dividing my attention more or less evenly between the world of their books and the art of their books ... so that a reader may study the work with pleasure as well as the world that it describes. — Annie Dillard

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

Every spring he vowed to quit teaching school, and every summer he missed his pupils and searched for them on the streets. — Annie Dillard

Whenever there is stillness there is the still small voice, God's speaking from the whirlwind, nature's old song, and dance ... — Annie Dillard

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

Decade's reading had justified his guess that men and women perceive love identically save for, say, five percent. Reading books by men and women showed only-but it is something- that love struck, in exactly the same way, most, but not all, of those few men and women, since the invention of writing, who wrote something down. An unfair sample. — Annie Dillard

Do women in love feel as men do? Do men love as women love? His virgin bride shared her pipe-frame bed all smiles and laughter. When they were intimate to the last degree on that bed, did Lou's experience join his, did his experience match hers, during this moment and that moment? — Annie Dillard

Does anything eat flowers. I couldn't recall having seen anything eat a flower - are they nature's privileged pets? — Annie Dillard

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

When I was fifteen, I felt it coming; now I was sixteen, and it hit. My feet had imperceptibly been set on a new path ... there wasn't a whole lot I could do about it, or about anything. I was going to hell on a handcart, that was all, and I knew it and everyone around me knew it, and there it was. — Annie Dillard

Since everyone around you agrees ever since there were people on earth that land is value, or labor is value, or learning is value, or title, degree, necklaces, murex shells, the ownership of slaves. Everyone knows bees sting and ghosts haunt and giving your robes away humiliates your rivals. That the enemies are barbarians. That wise men swim through the rock of the earth; that houses breed filth, airstrips attract airplanes, tornadoes punish, ancestors watch, and you can buy a shorter stay in purgatory. The black rock is holy, or the scroll; or the pangolin is holy, the quetzal is holy, this tree, water, rock, stone, cow, cross, or mountain--and it's all true. The Red Sox. Or nothing at all is holy, as everyone intelligent knows. — Annie Dillard

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. — Annie Dillard

The courage of children and beasts is a function of innocence. — Annie Dillard

You can serve or you can sing, and wreck your heart in prayer, working the world's hard work. — Annie Dillard

Bad poetry is almost always bad because it attempts to claim for itself the real power of whatever it describes in ten lines: a sky full of stars, first love, or Niagara Falls. — Annie Dillard

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

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

Much has been written about the life of the mind. — Annie Dillard

There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. — Annie Dillard

Concerning trees and leaves ... there's a real power here. It is amazing that trees can turn gravel and bitter salts into these soft-lipped lobes, as if I were to bite down on a granite slab and start to swell, bud and flower. Every year a given tree creates absolutely from scratch ninety-nine percent of its living parts. Water lifting up tree trunks can climb one hundred and fifty feet an hour; in full summer a tree can, and does, heave a ton of water every day. A big elm in a single season might make as many as six million leaves, wholly intricate, without budging an inch; I couldn't make one. A tree stands there, accumulating deadwood, mute and rigid as an obelisk, but secretly it seethes, it splits, sucks and stretches; it heaves up tons and hurls them out in a green, fringed fling. No person taps this free power; the dynamo in the tulip tree pumps out even more tulip tree, and it runs on rain and air. — Annie Dillard

A work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight. It is barely domesticated, a mustang on which you one day fastened a halter, but which now you cannot catch. It is a lion you cage in your study. As the work grows, it gets harder to control; it is a lion growing in strength. You must visit it every day and reassert your mastery over it. If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the door to its room. You enter its room with bravura, holding a chair at the thing and shouting, Simba! — Annie Dillard

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

Nature is, above all, profligate. Don't believe them when they tell you how economical and thrifty nature is, whose leaves return to the soil. Wouldn't it be cheaper to leave them on the tree in the first place? This deciduous business alone is a radical scheme, the brainchild of a deranged manic-depressive with limitless capital. Extravagance! Nature will try anything once. — Annie Dillard

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. — Annie Dillard

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

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

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

What geomancy reads what the windblown sand writes on the desert rock? I read there that all things live by a generous power and dance to a mighty tune; or I read there all things are scattered and hurled, that our every arabesque and grand jete is a frantic variation on our one free fall. — Annie Dillard

We are here to witness the creation and to abet it. — Annie Dillard

Poetry has been able to function quite directly as human interpretation of the raw, loose universe. It is a mixture, if you will, of journalism and metaphysics, or of science and religion. — Annie Dillard

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

I'm a housewife: I spend far more time on housework than anything else. — Annie Dillard

The question was not death; living things die. It was love. Not that we died, but that 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

Evidently, a given object took no particular amount of time to draw; instead the artist took the time, or didn't take it, at pleasure. And,similarly, things themselves possessed no fixed and intrinsic amount of interest; instead things were interesting as long as you had attention to give them. How long does it take to draw a baseball mitt? As much time as you care to give it. Not an infinite amount of time, but more time than you first imagined. For many days, so long as you want to keep drawing that mitt, and studying that mitt, there will always be a new and finer layer of distinctions to draw out and lay in. Your attention discovers - seems thereby to produce - an array of interesting features in any object, like a lamp. — Annie Dillard

I set up and staged hundreds of ends-of-the-world and watched, enthralled, as they played themselves out. — Annie Dillard

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

The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper; I cannot quite make it out. — Annie Dillard

Buddhism notes that it is always a mistake to think your soul can go it alone. — Annie Dillard

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

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

It is the beginning of a work that the writer throws away. — Annie Dillard

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

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

The creator is not puritan. A creature need not work for a living; creatures may simply steal and suck and be blessed for all that with a share - an enormous share - of the sunlight and air. — Annie Dillard

The writer studies literature, not the world. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write. — Annie Dillard

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

I didn't cry, because, actually, I was an intercontinental ballistic missile, with an atomic warhead; they don't cry. Why — Annie Dillard

People who take photographs during their whole vacation won't remember their vacation. They'll only remember what photographs they took. — Annie Dillard

As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker. — Annie Dillard

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

The secret of seeing is, then the pearl of great price. If I thought he could teach me to find it and keep it forever I would stagger barefoot across a hundred deserts after any lunatic at all. But although the pearl may be found, it may not be sought. The literature of illumination reveals this above all: although it comes to those who wait for it, it is always, even to the most practiced and adept, a gift and a total surprise. I return from one walk knowing where the killdeer nests in the field by the creek and the hour the laurel blooms. I return form the same walk a day later scarcely knowing my own name. Litanies hum in my ears; my tongue flaps in my mouth. Ailinon, alleluia! — Annie Dillard

I am no scientist. I explore the neighborhood. An infant who has just learned to hold up his head has a frank and forthright way of gazing about him in bewilderment. He hasn't the faintest clue where he is, and he aims to find out. In a couple of years, what he will have learned instead is how to fake it: he'll have the cocksure air of a squatter who has come to feel he owns the place. Some unwonted, taught pride diverts us from our original intent, which is to explore the neighborhood, view the landscape, to discover at least where it is that we have been so startlingly set down, if we can't learn why. — Annie Dillard

This light-shouldered boy could jitterbug, old style, and would; he was more precious than gold, yea, than much fine gold. We jitterbugged ... Only the strenth in our fingertips kept us alive. If they weakened or slipped, his fingertips or mine, we'd fall spinning backward across the length of the room and out through the glass French doors to the snowy terrace, and if we were any good we'd make sure we fell on the downbeat, snow or no snow. — Annie Dillard

The novel is a game or joke shared between author and reader. — Annie Dillard

Three days a week she helped at the Manor Nursing Home, where people proved their keenness by reciting received analyses of current events. All the Manor residents watched television day and night, informed to the eyeballs like everyone else and rushed for time, toward what end no one asked. Their cupidity and self-love were no worse than anyone else's, but their many experiences' having taught them so little irked Lou. One hated tourists, another southerners; another despised immigrants. Even dying, they still held themselves in highest regard. Lou would have to watch herself. For this way of thinking began to look like human nature
as if each person of two or three billion would spend his last vital drop to sustain his self-importance. — Annie Dillard

Possibly everyone now dead considered his own death as a freak accident, a mistake. Some bad luck caused it. Every enterprising man jack of them, and every sunlit vigorous woman and child, too, who had seemed so alive and pleased, was cold as a meat hook, and new chattering people trampled their bones unregarding, and rubbed their hands together and got to work improving their prospects till their own feet slipped and they went under themselves ... Every place was a tilting edge. — Annie Dillard

He judged the instant and let go; he flung himself loose into the stars. — Annie Dillard

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

Experiencing the present purely is being emptied and hollow; you catch the grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall. — Annie Dillard

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

Who and of what import were the men whose bones bulk the Great Wall, the thirty million Mao starved, or the thirty million children not yet five who die each year now? Why, they are the insignificant others, of course; living or dead, they are just some of the plentiful others ... And you? To what end were we billions of oddballs born? — Annie Dillard

There is no less holiness at this time- as you are reading this- than there was on the day the Red Sea parted, or that day in the 30th year, in the 4th month, on the 5th day of the month as Ezekiel was a captive by the river Cheban, when the heavens opened and he saw visions of god. There is no whit less enlightenment under the tree at the end of your street than there was under Buddha's bo tree ... . In any instant the sacred may wipe you with its finger. In any instant the bush may flare, your feet may rise, or you may see a bunch of souls in trees. — Annie Dillard

Now the thing is no longer a vision: it is paper. — Annie Dillard

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

We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us. — Annie Dillard

How you spend your days is how you spend your life. — Annie Dillard

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

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. — Annie Dillard

Our family was on the lunatic fringe. My mother was always completely irrepressible. My father made crowd noises into a microphone. — Annie Dillard

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

and the moon passes over the sun and nothing changes and nothing is learned because you have lost your bucket and shovel and no longer care. What if you regain the surface and open your sack and find, instead of treasure, a beast which jumps at you? Or you may not come back at all. The winches may jam, the scaffolding buckle, the air conditioning collapse. You may glance up one day and see by your headlamp the canary keeled over in its cage. You may reach into a cranny for pearls and touch a moray eel. You yank on your rope; it is too late. — Annie Dillard

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

Life by its mere appalling length is a feat of endurance for which you haven't the strength. — Annie Dillard

In the great meteor shower of August, the Perseid, I wail all day for the shooting stars I miss. They're out there showering down, committing hari-kiri in a flame of fatal attraction, and hissing perhaps into the ocean. But at dawn what looks like a blue dome clamps down over me like a lid on a pot. The stars and planets could smash and I'd never know. Only a piece of ashen moon occasionally climbs up or down the inside of the dome, and our local star without surcease explodes on our heads. We have really only that one light, one source for all power, and yet we must turn away from it by universal decree. Nobody here on the planet seems aware of that strange, powerful taboo, that we all walk about carefully averting our faces, this way and that, lest our eyes be blasted forever. — Annie Dillard

Your feelings are none of your business. — Annie Dillard

I knew well that people could not fly - as well as anyone knows it - but I also knew the kicker: that, as the books put it, with faith all things are possible. — Annie Dillard

No child on earth was ever meant to be ordinary, and you can see it in them, and they know it, too, but then the times get to them, and they wear out their brains learning what folks expect, and spend their strength trying to rise over those same folks. — Annie Dillard