Annie Dillard Quotes

Think of a globe, a revolving globe on a stand. Think of a contour globe, whose mountain ranges cast...

Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memor...

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

Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of ...

There is neither a proportional relationship, nor an inverse one, between a writer’s estimation of a...

Only after a writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature. In working-class Fra...

So it is that a writer writes many books. In each book, he intended several urgent and vivid points,...

Nobody whispers it in your ear. It is like something you memorized once and forgot. Now it comes bac...

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

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

I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend. During visiting hours, I en...

In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers ...

One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right...

The feeling that the work is magnificent, and the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes...

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and with that...

If you ask a twenty-one-year-old poet whose poetry he likes, he might say, unblushing, "Nobody's," I...

Get to work. Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in t...

Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery prob...

The most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing onesel...

One of the few things I know about writing is this:spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, right a...

Putting a book together is interesting and exhilarating. It is sufficiently difficult and complex an...

Writing every book, the writer must solve two problems: Can it be done? and, Can I do it? Every book...

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

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

Under her high brows, she eyed him straight on and straight across. She had gone to girls' schools, ...

Lou asked point-blank, Can love last? (Rural people get to philosophizing, and will say anything.)—O...

Love so sprang at her, she honestly thought no one had ever looked into it. Where was it in literatu...

Three days a week she helped at the Manor Nursing Home, where people proved their keenness by reciti...

Do women in love feel as men do? Do men love as women love? His virgin bride shared her pipe-frame b...

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

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

Since everyone around you agrees ever since there were people on earth that land is value, or labor ...

Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fa...

I think that the dying pray at the last not "please," but "thank you," as a guest thanks his host at...

Nature's silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutab...

She is nine, beloved, as open-faced as the sky and as self-contained. I have watched her grow. As re...

At a certain point, you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. N...

You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will fin...

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

We are here to witness. There is nothing else to do with those mute materials we do not need. Until ...

I alternate between thinking of the planet as home - dear and familiar stone hearth and garden - and...

In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these mo...

It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to le...

There was only silence. It was the silence of matter caught in the act and embarrassed. There were n...

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

We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up. We teach our children to look a...

Nature's silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutab...

Could two live that way? Could two live under the wild rose, and explore by the pond, so that the sm...

In the great meteor shower of August, the Perseid, I wail all day for the shooting stars I miss. The...

The remarkable thing about the world of insects, however, is precisely that there is no veil cast ov...

I smelled silt on the wind, turkey, laundry, leaves . . . my God what a world. There is no accountin...

I am sitting here, you are sitting there. Say even that you are sitting across the kitchen table fro...

The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside by a generous hand. But- and this...

Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery. The surface of mystery is not smooth, any mor...

What have we been doing all these centuries but trying to call God back to the mountain, or, failing...

I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked the local missionary priest, ‘If I did not know about God an...

Were the earth as smooth as a ball bearing, it might be beautiful seen from another planet, as the r...

I chanced on a wonderful book by Marius von Senden, called Space and Sight. . . . For the newly sigh...

Their song reminds me of a child’s neighborhood rallying cry—ee-ock-ee—with a heartfelt warble at th...

Those people who shoot endless time-lapse films of unfurling roses and tulips have the wrong idea. T...

It looked as though the leaves of the autumn forest had taken flight, and were pouring down the vall...

If she[…] had known how much her first half-inch beginning to let go would take - and how long her n...

The mountains are great stone bells; they clang together like nuns. Who shushed the stars? There are...

I was in no tent under leaves, sleepless and glad. There was no moon at all; along the world’s coast...

Shadow is the blue patch where the light doesn’t hit. It is mystery itself, and mystery is the ancie...

An acre of poppies and a forest of spruce boggle no one’s mind. Even ten square miles of wheat gladd...

You are God. You want to make a forest, something to hold the soil, lock up energy, and give off oxy...

If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" "No", said the priest, "not if you did not...

I want to think about trees. Trees have a curious relationship to the subject of the present moment....

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

Say you could view a time-lapse film of our planet: what would you see? Transparent images moving th...

Oh, it’s mysterious lamplit evenings, here in the galaxy, one after the other. It’s one of those nig...

Yesterday I watched a curious nightfall. The cloud ceiling took on a warm tone, deepened, and depart...

At the time of Lewis and Clark, setting the prairies on fire was a well-known signal that meant, ‘Co...

I am a sacrifice bound with cords to the horns of the world's rock altar, waiting for worms. I take ...

What I aim to do is not so much learn the names of the shreds of creation that flourish in this vall...

What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are not they both saying: Hello? We sp...

Geography is the key, the crucial accident of birth. A piece of protein could be a snail, a sea lion...

I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.

If, as Heraclitus suggests, god, like an oracle, neither "declares nor hides, but sets forth by sign...

I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was l...

I am a fugitive and a vagabond, a sojourner seeking signs.

Mountains are giant, restful, absorbent. You can heave your spirit into a mountain and the mountain ...

At night on land migrating monarchs slumber on certain trees, hung in festoons with wings folded tog...

The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit's one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingl...

When her doctor took her bandages off and led her into the garden, the girl who was no longer blind ...

Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don't affair. A fish flashes, then diss...

Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a world to compass these things, a w...

The silence is not suppression; instead, it is all there is.

The secret of seeing is, then the pearl of great price. If I thought he could teach me to find it an...

I watch the running sheets of light raised on the creek surface. The sight has the appeal of the pur...

And under the cicadas, deeper down that the longest taproot, between and beneath the rounded black r...

Xerxes, I read, ‘halted his unwieldy army for days that he might contemplate to his satisfaction’ th...

The answer must be, I think, that the beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense...

In nature, improbabilities are the one stock in trade. The whole creation is one lunatic fringe. If ...

It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether...

I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten a...

Innocence is a better world.

That it’s rough out there and chancy is no surprise. Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of ext...

The universe that suckled us is a monster that does not care if we live or die--it does not care if ...

Thomas Merton wrote, “there is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, makin...