Top Quotes of Annie Dillard
- “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” – Annie Dillard
- “I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers.” – Annie Dillard
- “Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.” – Annie Dillard
- “The surest sign of age is loneliness” – Annie Dillard
- “The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest.” – Annie Dillard
Top Quotes of Annie Dillard
Quotes about Age and Awareness by Annie Dillard
Creation and Grace Quotes by Annie Dillard
Quotes of Annie Dillard about Heart and Life
Annie Dillard’s Quotes on Soul and Time
Universe Quotes of Annie Dillard
Quotes about Age and Awareness by 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
It’s a little silly to finally learn how to write at this age. But I long ago realized I was secretly sincere.
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
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 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
Creation and Grace Quotes by Annie Dillard
The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.
Annie Dillard
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
At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it.
Annie Dillard
Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we sense them
Annie Dillard
Experiencing the present purely is being empty and hollow; you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.
Annie Dillard
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
Quotes of Annie Dillard about Heart and Life
The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.
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
You can serve or you can sing, and wreck your heart in prayer, working the world’s hard work.
Annie Dillard
You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then-and only then-it is handed to you.
Annie Dillard
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
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
I think that the dying pray at the last not please but thank you, as a guest thanks his host at the door. Falling from airplanes the people are crying thank you, thank you, all down the air; and the cold carriages draw up for them on the rocks.
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
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
Our life seems cursed to be a wiggle merely, and a wandering without end.
Annie Dillard
The way we live our days, is the way we live our lives.
Annie Dillard
We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall.
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
Annie Dillard’s Quotes on Soul and Time
According to Inuit culture in Greenland, a person possesses six or seven souls. The souls take the form of tiny people scattered throughout the body.
Annie Dillard
An Eskimo shaman said, Life’s greatest danger lies in the fact that man’s food consists entirely of souls.
Annie Dillard
Buddhism notes that it is always a mistake to think your soul can go it alone.
Annie Dillard
Ecstasy, I think, is a soul’s response to the waves holiness makes as it nears.
Annie Dillard
The soul may ask God for anything, and never fail.
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
Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.
Annie Dillard
Time is the continuous loop, the snakeskin with scales endlessly overlapping without beginning or end, or time is an ascending spiral if you will, like a child’s toy Slinky.
Annie Dillard
Universe Quotes of Annie Dillard
A shepherd on a hilltop who looks at a mess of stars and thinks, ‘There’s a hunter, a plow, a fish,’ is making mental connections that have as much real force in the universe as the very fires in those stars themselves.
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
poetry has been able to function quite directly as human interpretation of the raw, loose universe. It is a mixture, if you will, of journalism and metaphysics, or of science and religion.
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
The universe is illusion merely, not one speck of it real, and we are not only its victims, falling always into or smashed by a planet slung by the sun-but also its captives, bound by the mineral-made ropes of our senses.
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