Quotes by Annie Dillard

About Annie Dillard:

Annie Dillard is an American author, best known for her narrative prose in both fiction and non-fiction. She has published works of poetry, essays, prose, and literary criticism, as well as two novels and one memoir. Her 1974 work Pilgrim at Tinker Creek won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Dillard taught for 21 years in the English department of Wesleyan University, in Middletown, Connecticut.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

The higher Christian churches...come at God with an unwarranted air of professionalism, with authority and pomp, as though they knew what they were doing, as though people in themselves were an appropriate set of creatures to have dealings with God.....

Annie Dillard

So live. I'll be the nun for you. I am now.

Annie Dillard

The surest sign of age is loneliness.

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

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.

Annie Dillard

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

Annie Dillard

Just think: in all the clean, beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a blot; our planet alone has death.

Annie Dillard

People love pretty much the same things best. A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.

Annie Dillard

A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.

Annie Dillard

He had been a boy who liked to draw, according to my friend, so he became an architect. Children who drew,I learned, became architects; I had thought they became painters. My friend explained that it was not proper to become a painter; it couldn’t ...

Annie Dillard

Evidently, a given object took no particular amount of time to draw; instead the artist took the time, or didn’t take it, at pleasure. And,similarly, things themselves possessed no fixed and intrinsic amount of interest; instead things were interes...

Annie Dillard

A child is asleep. Her private life unwinds inside skin and skull; only as she sheds childhood, first one decade and then another, can she locate the actual, historical stream, see the setting of her dreaming private life—the nation, the city, the ...

Annie Dillard

The interior life expands and fills; it approaches the edge of skin; it thickens with its own vivid story; it even begins to hear rumors, from beyond the horizon skin’s rim, of nations and wars. You wake one day and discover your grandmother; you w...

Annie Dillard

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

I had a head for religious ideas. They were the first ideas I ever encountered. They made other ideas seem mean....I had miles of Bible in memory: some perforce, but most by hap, like the words to songs. There was no corner of my brain where you coul...

Annie Dillard

Private life, book life, took place where words met imagination without passing through the world.

Annie Dillard

What can we make of the inexpressible joy of children? It is a kind of gratitude, I think—the gratitude of the ten-year-old who wakes to her own energy and the brisk challenge of the world. You thought you knew the place and all its routines, but y...

Annie Dillard

The interior life is often stupid. Its egoism blinds it and deafens it; its imagination spins out ignorant tales, fascinated. It fancies that the western wind blows on the Self, and leaves fall at the feet of the Self for a reason, and people are wat...

Annie Dillard

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, informed to the eyeballs like everyone else and rush...

Annie Dillard

Under her high brows, she eyed him straight on and straight across. She had gone to girls' schools, he recalled later. Those girls looked straight at you.

Annie Dillard

Author Bio

  • NameAnnie Dillard
  • DescriptionAmerican writer
  • BornApril 30, 1945
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionPoet; Author; Novelist
  • WorksThe Maytrees
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship; Pulitzer Prize For General Non-Fiction