110+ Annie Dillard Quotes On Writing, Nature And Evocative

Annie Dillard is an American author best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning work Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. She is a prolific author, having written several books of poetry, essays, and novels. She is also a professor of English and creative writing at Wesleyan University. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Annie Dillard on writing, nature, evocative.

Top 10 Annie Dillard Quotes

1. How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
2. No one escapes the wilderness on the way to the promised land.
3. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.
4. Experiencing the present purely is being empty and hollow; you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.
5. As a life's work, I would remember everything - everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net.
6. If we listened to our intellect, we’d never have a love affair... or go into business. You’ve got to jump off cliffs and build your wings on the way down.
7. Then why did you tell me?
8. I couldn't unpeach the peaches.
9. The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.
10. Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.

Annie Dillard Short Quotes

• The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper; I cannot quite make it out.
• You can't test courage cautiously.
• What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.
• The real and proper question is: why is it beautiful?
• I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam.
• Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you.
• There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.
• I am a fugitive and a vagabond, a sojourner seeking signs.
• I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers.
• Nothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves.

Annie Dillard Quotes About Writing

The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less. — Annie Dillard

One of the few things I know about writing is this: Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book, give it, give it all, give it now. — Annie Dillard

Adverbs are a sign that you've used the wrong verb. — Annie Dillard

A schedule defends from chaos and whim. A net for catching days. — Annie Dillard

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and with that one, is what we are doing. — 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

When you write, you lay out a line of words. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. — Annie Dillard

Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world. — Annie Dillard

A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order - willed, faked, and so brought into being. — 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

Annie Dillard Quotes About Nature

Theirs is the mystery of continuous creation and all that providence implies: the uncertainty of vision, the horror of the fixed, the dissolution of the present, the intricacy of beauty, the pressure of fecundity, the elusiveness of the free, and the flawed nature of perfection. — Annie Dillard

We are here to abet creation and to witness to it, to notice each other's beautiful face and complex nature so that creation need not play to an empty house. — 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

Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don't affair. A fish flashes, then dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much salt. Deer apparently ascend bodily into heaven; the brightest oriole fades into leaves. — Annie Dillard

If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed. — Annie Dillard

Nature's silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block. — Annie Dillard

It could be that our faithlessness is a cowering cowardice born of our very smallness, a massive failure of imagination. If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed. — Annie Dillard

Caring passionately about something isn't against nature, and it isn't against human nature. It's what we're here to do. — Annie Dillard

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

There is no whit less enlightenment under the tree by your street than there was under the Buddha's bo tree. I invite you to go sit under that tree by your street. — Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard Quotes About Life

An Inuit hunter 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 Inuit earnestly, did you tell me? — Annie Dillard

[Insects] are not only cold-blooded, and green- and yellow-blooded, but are also cased in a clacking horn. They have rigid eyes and brains strung down their backs. But they make up the bulk of our comrades-at-life, so I look to them for a glimmer of companionship. — Annie Dillard

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

An Eskimo shaman said, Life's greatest danger lies in the fact that man's food consists entirely of souls. — Annie Dillard

Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery. — Annie Dillard

I wake expectant, hoping to see a new thing. — Annie Dillard

The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. — Annie Dillard

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 — Annie Dillard

We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up. We teach our children to look alive there, to join by words and activities the life of human culture on the planet — Annie Dillard

Your freedom as a writer is not freedom of expression in the sense of wild blurting; you may not let 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

Annie Dillard Quotes About World

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

I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. — Annie Dillard

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

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

The world is wider in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain and Lazarus. — Annie Dillard

Having chosen this foolishness, I was a free being. How could the world ever stop me, how could I betray myself, if I was not afraid? — Annie Dillard

Private life, book life, took place where words met imagination without passing through the world. — Annie Dillard

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

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

Annie Dillard Quotes About Writer

Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles. — Annie Dillard

People love pretty much the same things best. A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all. — 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

For writing a first draft requires from the writer a peculiar internal state which ordinary life does not induce. ... how to set yourself spinning? — Annie Dillard

The way to learn about a writer is to read the text. Or texts. — Annie Dillard

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

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

Writers serve as the memory of a people. They chew over our public past. — Annie Dillard

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

Annie Dillard Quotes About Lives

She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live. — 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

These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present. — Annie Dillard

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

I would like to live. . . open to time and death painlessly, noticing everything, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will. — Annie Dillard

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

The way we live our days, is the way we live our lives. — Annie Dillard

Dan Gerber is one of our finest living poets. — Annie Dillard

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

Trees have a curious relationship to the subject of the present moment. There are many created things in the universe that outlive us, that outlive the sun, even, but I can't think about them. I live with trees. — Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard Famous Quotes And Sayings

It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping God may wake someday and take offense, or the waking God may draw us out to where we can never return. — Annie Dillard

Crystals grew inside rock like arithmetic flowers. They lengthened and spread, added plane to plane in an awed and perfect obedience to an absolute geometry that even stones - maybe only the stones - understood. — Annie Dillard

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

Geography is the key, the crucial accident of birth. A piece of protein could be a snail, a sea lion, or a systems analyst, but it had to start somewhere. This is not science; it is merely metaphor. And the landscape in which the protein "starts" shapes its end as surely as bowls shape water. — 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 blinded note of the ten thousand things, the whine of wings. You take a step in the right direction to pray to this silence, and even to address the prayer to "World." Distinctions blur. Quit your tents. Pray without ceasing. — Annie Dillard

Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff. — Annie Dillard

Write about winter in the summer. Describe Norway as Ibsen did, from a desk in Italy; describe Dublin as James Joyce did, from a desk in Paris. Willa Cather wrote her prairie novels in New York City; Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn in Hartford, Connecticut. Recently, scholars learned that Walt Whitman rarely left his room. — Annie Dillard

I still try to keep my eyes open. I'm always on the lookout for antlion traps in sandy soil, monarch pupae near milkweed, skipper larvae in locust leaves. These things are utterly common, and I've not seen one — Annie Dillard

Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair. — Annie Dillard

We live in all we seek. The hidden shows up in too-plain sight. It lives captive on the face of the obvious - the people, events, and things of the day - to which we as sophisticated children have long since become oblivious. What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color. — Annie Dillard

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

Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark. — 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 the wear out their brains learning what folks expect, and spend their strength trying to rise over those same folks. — Annie Dillard

There must be bands of enthusiasts for everything on earth-fanatics who shared a vocabulary, a batch of technical skills and equipment, and, perhaps, a vision of some single slice of the beauty and mystery of things, of their complexity, fascination, and unexpectedness. — Annie Dillard

There is neither a proportional relationship, nor an inverse one, between a writer’s estimation of a work in progress & its actual quality. The feeling that the work is magnificent, & the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged. — Annie Dillard

Time is the warp and matter the weft of the woven texture of beauty in space, and death is the hurling shuttle. — Annie Dillard

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

Aim for the chopping block. If you aim for the wood, you will have nothing. Aim past the wood, aim through the wood; aim for the chopping block. — Annie Dillard

I don't know what it is about fecundity that so appalls. I suppose it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonishingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful, and that with extravagance goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives. — Annie Dillard

No; we have been as usual asking the wrong question. It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singing. The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful? — 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

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

It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave. It is hard to desecrate a grove and change your mind. The very holy mountains are keeping mum. We doused the burning bush and cannot rekindle it; we are lighting matches in vain under every green tree. — Annie Dillard

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

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

You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it... The vision is not so much destroyed, exactly, as it is, by the time you have finished, forgotten. It has been replaced by this changeling. — Annie Dillard

Divinity is not playful. The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensibl e earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and fleet. There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see. — Annie Dillard

What have we been doing all these centuries but trying to call God back to the mountain, or, failing that, raise a peep out of anything that isn't us? What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are not they both saying: Hello? We spy on whales and on interstellar radio objects; we starve ourselves and pray till we're blue. — Annie Dillard

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

I woke at intervals until . . . the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not. — Annie Dillard

It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. — Annie Dillard

When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner's pick, a wood carver's gouge, a surgeon's probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year. — Annie Dillard

The universe that suckled us is a monster that does not care if we live or die--it does not care if it itself grinds to a halt. It is a beast running on chance and death, careening from nowhere to nowhere. It is fixed and blind, a robot programmed to kill. We are free and seeing; we can only try to outwit it at every turn to save our lives. — Annie Dillard

Skin was earth; it was soil. I could see, even on my own skin, the joined trapezoids of dust specks God had wetted and stuck with his spit the morning he made Adam from dirt. Now, all these generations later, we people could still see on our skin the inherited prints of the dust specks of Eden. — Annie Dillard

Eskimo: "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" Priest: "No, not if you did not know." Eskimo: "Then why did you tell me?" — Annie Dillard

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

Unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous. — Annie Dillard

Doing something does not require discipline. It creates its own discipline - with a little help from caffeine. — Annie Dillard

Today is one of those excellent January partly cloudies in which light chooses an unexpected part of the landscape to trick out in gilt, and then the shadow sweeps it away. You know you're alive. You take huge steps, trying to feel the planet's roundness arc between your feet. — Annie Dillard

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

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

At a certain point, you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening. — Annie Dillard

I am sorry I ran from you. I am still running, running from that knowledge, that eye, that love from which there is no refuge. For you meant only love, and love, and I felt only fear, and pain. So once in Israel love came to us incarnate, stood in the doorway between two worlds, and we were all afraid. — Annie Dillard

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

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

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

You can't test courage cautiously, so I ran hard and waved my arms hard, happy. — Annie Dillard

Self-consciousness is the curse of the city and all that sophistication implies. — Annie Dillard

What I sought in books was imagination. It was depth, depth of thought and feeling; some sort of extreme of subject matter; some nearness to death; some call to courage. I myself was getting wild; I wanted wildness, originality, genius, rapture, hope. ... What I sought in books was a world whose surfaces, whose people and events and days lived, actually matched the exaltation of the interior life. There you could live. — Annie Dillard

The creative process obtains in all creative acts. So if I'm painting suddenly I'll see something that I didn't see before. — Annie Dillard

Life Lessons by Annie Dillard

1. Annie Dillard teaches us to appreciate the beauty of the world around us and to be mindful of the present moment.
2. She encourages us to be curious and explore the unknown, to take risks and to be open to new experiences.
3. Above all, she reminds us to live life to its fullest and to never take anything for granted.