"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)

"The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all."
— Annie Dillard, speaking on writing

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

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

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

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

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

"I saw in a blue haze all the world poured flat and pale between the mountains"
— Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)