quotes by Annie Dillard

"How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. "
— Annie Dillard

"Spend the afternoon, you can't take it with you"
— Annie Dillard

"We sleep to time's hurdy-gurdy; we wake, if ever we wake, to the silence of God. And then, when we wake to the deep shores of time uncreated, then when the dazzling dark breaks over the far slopes of time, then it's time to toss things, like our reason, and our will; then it's time to break our necks for home.
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 (Holy the Firm)

"What does it feel like to be alive?
Living, you stand under a waterfall. You leave the sleeping shore deliberately; you shed your dusty clothes, pick your barefoot way over the high, slippery rocks, hold your breath, choose your footing, and step into the waterfall. The hard water pelts your skull, bangs in bits on your shoulders and arms. The strong water dashes down beside you and you feel it along your calves and thighs rising roughly backup, up to the roiling surface, full of bubbles that slide up your skin or break on you at full speed. Can you breathe here? Here where the force is the greatest and only the strength of your neck holds the river out of your face. Yes, you can breathe even here. You could learn to live like this. And you can, if you concentrate, even look out at the peaceful far bank where you try to raise your arms. What a racket in your ears, what a scattershot pummeling!
It is time pounding at you, time. 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 (An American Childhood)

"I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck."
— Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)

"Books swept me away, this way and that, one after the other; I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them"
— 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

"There is always the temptation in life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for years on end. It is all so self conscience, so apparently moral...But I won't have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous...more extravagant and bright. We are...raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus."
— Annie Dillard

"Nothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves."
— 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

"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 (An American Childhood)

"He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write. He is careful of what he learns, for that is what he will know."
— Annie Dillard (The Writing Life)

"'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 (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)

"The real and proper question is: why is it beutiful?"
— Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)

" This is it, I think, this is it, right now, the present, this empty gas station, here, this western wind, this tang of coffee on the tongue, and I am petting the puppy, I am watching the mountain. And the second I verbalize this awareness in my brain, I cease to see the mountain or feel the puppy. I am opaque, so much black asphalt. But at the same second, the second I know I've lost it, I also realize that the puppy is still squirming on his back under my hand. Nothing has changed for him. He draws his legs down to stretch the skin taut so he feels every fingertip's stroke along his furred and arching side, his flank, his flung-back throat.
I sip my coffee. I look at the mountain, which is still doing its tricks, as you look at a still-beautiful face belonging to a person who was once your lover in another country years ago: with fond nostalgia, and recognition, but no real feeling save a secret astonishment that you are now strangers. Thanks. For the memories. 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, cutting us off at both ends. I get in the car and drive home."
— Annie Dillard

"You can't test courage cautiously, so I ran hard and waved my arms hard, happy."
— Annie Dillard (An American Childhood)

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

"We are here to witness the creation and to abet it."
— Annie Dillard (Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters)

"It would seem that emotions are the curse, not death-emotions that appear to have developed upon a few freaks as a special curse from Malevolence. All right then. It is our emotions that are amiss. We are freaks, the world is fine, and let us all go have lobotomies to restore us to a natural state. We can leave the library then, go back to the creek lobotomized, and live on its banks as untroubled as any muskrat or reed. You first."
— Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)

"The mockingbird took a single step into the air and dropped. His wings were still folded against his sides as though he were singing from a limb and not falling, accelerating thirty-two feet per second per second, through empty air. Just a breath before he would have been dashed to the ground, he unfurled his wings with exact, deliberate care, revealing the broad bars of white, spread his elegant, white-banded tail, and so floated onto the grass. I had just rounded a corner when his incouciant step caught my eye; there was no one else in sight. The fact of his free fall was like the old philosophical conundrum about the tree that falls in the forest. The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there."
— 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 (The Writing Life)

"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

"I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as a dying friend. I hold its hand and hope it will get better."
— Annie Dillard (The Writing Life)

"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 (An American Childhood)

"I had been chipping at the world idly, and had by accident uncovered vast and labyrinthine further worlds within it."
— Annie Dillard (An American Childhood)

"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 (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)

"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 (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)

"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 (Teaching a Stone to Talk, Expeditions and Encounters)

"What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color."
— Annie Dillard

"The dedicated life is the life worth living. You must give with your whole heart."
— Annie Dillard

"Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?"
— Annie Dillard

"There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been."
— Annie Dillard

"A schedule defends from chaos and whim. A net for catching days."
— Annie Dillard (The Writing Life)

"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

"It is no less difficult to write a sentence in a recipe than sentences in Moby Dick. So you might as well write Moby Dick."
— Annie Dillard

"Out of a human population on earth of four and a half billion, perhaps twenty people can write a book in a year. Some people lift cars, too. Some people enter week-long sled-dog races, go over Niagara Falls in a barrel, fly planes through the Arc de Triomphe. Some people feel no pain in childbirth. Some people eat cars. There is no call to take human extremes as norms."
— Annie Dillard (The Writing Life)

"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 (An American Childhood)

"Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or another book; give it, give it all, give it now. the impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better."
— Annie Dillard (The Writing Life)

"Noticing and remembering everything would trap bright scenes to light and fill the blank and darkening past which was already piling up behind me. The growing size of that blank and ever-darkening past frightened me; it loomed beside me like a hole in the air and battened on scraps of my life I failed to claim. If one day I forgot to notice my life, and be damned grateful for it, the blank cave would suck me up entire."
— Annie Dillard (An American Childhood)

"If even rock was interesting, if even this ugliness was worth whole shelves at the library, required sophisticated tools to study, and inspired grown men to crack mountains and saw crystals--then what wasn't?"
— Annie Dillard (An American Childhood)

"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 (An American Childhood)

"How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this our and with that one, is what we are doing."
— Annie Dillard (The Writing Life)

"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 (Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters)

"To dust is only to forestall burial "
— Annie Dillard

"If indeed [nature] has no greater aim than to provide a home for her greatest experiment, Man, it would be just like her methods to scatter a million stars wherof one might haply achieve her purpose."
— Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)

"She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live. She read books as one would breathe ether, to sink in and die."
— Annie Dillard (The Living: A Novel)

"It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance."
— Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)

"I seem to be on a road, walking, greeting the hedgerows, the rose-hips, the apples and thorn. I seem to be on a road, walking, familiar with neighbors, high-handed with cattle, smelling the sea, and alone. Already, I know the names of things. I can kick a stone."
— Annie Dillard (Holy the Firm)

"if you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not."
— Annie Dillard (For the Time Being)

"We live in all we seek."
— Annie Dillard (For the Time Being)