Annie Dillard quotes

Annie Dillard is an American author, best known for her narrative nonfiction and poetic prose. Her work explores themes of nature, spirituality, and the human experience. She has won numerous literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Here are 119 of her quotes:

There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by.

Annie Dillard

I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.

Annie Dillard

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

Annie Dillard

The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.

Annie Dillard

The surest sign of age is loneliness.

Annie Dillard

Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?

Annie Dillard

It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as separating us from our creator, our very self-consciousness, is also the one thing that divides us from our fellow creatures. It was a bitter birthday present from evolution.

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

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

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.

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

Like any child, I slid into myself perfectly fitted, as a diver meets her reflection in a pool. Her fingertips enter the fingertips on the water, her wrists slide up her arms. The diver wraps herself in her reflection wholly, sealing it at the toes, and wears it as she climbs rising from the pool, and ever after.

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

There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.

Annie Dillard

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

Annie Dillard

We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence.

Annie Dillard

There are no events but thoughts and the heart's hard turning, the heart's slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times.

Annie Dillard

The painter... does not fit the paints to the world. He most certainly does not fit the world to himself. He fits himself to the paint. The self is the servant who bears the paintbox and its inherited contents.

Annie Dillard

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

A schedule defends from chaos and whim.

Annie Dillard

You can't test courage cautiously.

Annie Dillard

The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring. It is the sensation of a stunt pilot's turning barrel rolls, or an inchworm's blind rearing from a stem in search of a route. At its worst, it feels like alligator wrestling, at the level of the sentence.

Annie Dillard