Annie Dillard Quotes

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Matters of taste are not, it turns out, moral issues.

  Annie Dillard

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• Our family was on the lunatic fringe. My mother was always completely irrepressible. My father made crowd noises into a microphone.

  Annie Dillard

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• Much has been written about the life of the mind.

  Annie Dillard

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• The mind of the writer does indeed do something before it dies, and so does its owner, but I would be hard put to call it living.

  Annie Dillard

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• The Pulitzer is more useful than meaningful.

  Annie Dillard

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

  Annie Dillard

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Write about winter in the summer.

  Annie Dillard

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• Write as if you were dying.

  Annie Dillard

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• You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it to the page. The page is jealous and tyrannical; the page is made of time and matter; the page always wins.

  Annie Dillard

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the surface of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what’s going on here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise.

  Annie Dillard

  Topics in Life

  Tags in Gratitude, Questions, Understanding, Mystery

•  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

  Topics in Religion

  Tags in Hell

• “One of the main reasons that it is so easy to march men off to war,” says Ernest Becker, is that “each of them feels sorry for the man next to him who will die.”

  Annie Dillard

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in War

• I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again.

  Annie Dillard

• Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.

  Annie Dillard

• You can’t test courage cautiously.

  Annie Dillard

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

  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

• The writer studies literature, not the world. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write.

  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

Annie Dillard (56)

Birth:	30th April, 1945
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Author, Essayist, Novelist, Poet, Teacher

About

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.

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Today's Anniversary - 1st April

Births

• 1855 - Agnes Repplier
• 1922 - Alan Perlis
• 1973 - Rachel Maddow
• 1873 - Sergei Rachmaninoff
• 1895 - Alberta Hunter

Deaths

• 1960 - David Seabury
• 1994 - Robert Doisneau
• 1917 - Scott Joplin
• 1991 - Martha Graham
• 1976 - Max Ernst