Annie Dillard Quotes

You can read in the space of a coffin, and you can write in the space of a toolshed meant for mowers and spades.

If you ask a twenty-one-year-old poet whose poetry he likes, he might say, unblushing, Nobody's, In his youth, he has not yet understood that poets like poetry, and novelists like novels; he himself l...

About Author

Annie Dillard (née Doak; born April 30, 1945) is an American author, best known for her narrative prose in both fiction and nonfiction. She has published works of poetry, essays, prose, and literary criticism, as well as two novels and one memoir. Her 1974 book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. From 1980, Dillard taught for 21 years in the English department of Wesleyan University, in Middletown, Connecticut.

The creatures I seek do not want to be seen.

Think of a globe, a revolving globe on a stand. Think of a contour globe, whose mountain ranges cast shadows, whose continents rise in bas-relief above the oceans. But then: think of how it really is....

An acre of poppies and a forest of spruce boggle no one’s mind. Even ten square miles of wheat gladdens the hearts of most . . . No, in the plant world, and especially among the flowering plants, fecu...

Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.

There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable.

The remarkable thing about the world of insects, however, is precisely that there is no veil cast over these horrors. These are mysteries performed in broad daylight before our very eyes; we can see e...

Only after a writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature. In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers said, It is the trad...

This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. the afternoon. You can't take it with you.

In the great meteor shower of August, the Perseid, I wail all day for the shooting stars I miss. They’re out there showering down, committing hari-kiri in a flame of fatal attraction, and hissing perh...

The surest sign of age is loneliness.

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

Three days a week she helped at the Manor Nursing Home, where people proved their keenness by reciting received analyses of current events. All the Manor residents watched television day and night, in...

Their song reminds me of a child’s neighborhood rallying cry—ee-ock-ee—with a heartfelt warble at the end. But it is their call that is especially endearing. The towhee has the brass and grace to call...

Buddhism notes that it is always a mistake to think your soul can go it alone.

Outside the study hall the next fall, the fall of our senior year, the Nabisco plant baked sweet white bread twice a week. If I sharpened a pencil at the back of the room I could smell the baking brea...

It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own in...

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.

It's a little silly to finally learn how to write at this age. But I long ago realized I was secretly sincere.