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

There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by.

Annie Dillard

Eskimo: 'If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?' Priest: 'No, not if you did not know.' Eskimo: 'Then why did you tell me?'

Annie Dillard

God gave me a talent to draw. I 'owed' it to him to develop the talent.

Annie Dillard

The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.

Annie Dillard

As a life's work, I would remember everything - everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net.

Annie Dillard

I worked so hard all my life, and all I want to do now is read.

Annie Dillard

When I teach, I preach. I thump the Bible. I exhort my students morally. I talk to them about the dedicated life.

Annie Dillard

Much has been written about the life of the mind.

Annie Dillard

The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring. It is the sensation of a stunt pilot's turning barrel rolls, or an inchworm's blind rearing from a stem in search of a route. At its worst, it feels like alliga...

Annie Dillard

Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you.

Annie Dillard

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.

Annie Dillard

Crystals grew inside rock like arithmetic flowers. They lengthened and spread, added plane to plane in an awed and perfect obedience to an absolute geometry that even stones - maybe only the stones - understood.

Annie Dillard

The painter... does not fit the paints to the world. He most certainly does not fit the world to himself. He fits himself to the paint. The self is the servant who bears the paintbox and its inherited contents.

Annie Dillard

Write about winter in the summer.

Annie Dillard

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

I noticed this process of waking, and predicted with terrifying logic that one of these years not far away I would be awake continuously and never slip back, and never be free of myself again.

Annie Dillard

The writer studies literature, not the world.

Annie Dillard

If you're going to publish a book, you probably are going to make a fool of yourself.

Annie Dillard

When I first read the words 'introvert' and 'extrovert' when I was 10, I thought I was both.

Annie Dillard

I never met a man who was shaken by a field of identical blades of grass. An acre of poppies and a forest of spruce boggle no one's mind.

Annie Dillard

'Fecundity' is an ugly word for an ugly subject. It is ugly, at least, in the eggy animal world. I don't think it is for plants.

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