Unveiling top 50 Annie Dillard quote for Inspiration

Annie Dillard, a luminous figure in contemporary literature, intricately weaves together observations of nature, spirituality, and the human experience in her works. Her profound insights, captured within succinct and powerful quotes, serve as windows into the depths of existence. As we embark on an exploration of her wisdom, we uncover a collection of the top 50 Annie Dillard quote that resonate with the essence of life, offering glimpses of inspiration, contemplation, and a profound connection to the world around us.

• How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
• Writing a book is like rearing children — willpower has very little to do with it. If you have a little baby crying in the middle of the night, and if you depend only on willpower to get you out of bed to feed the baby, that baby will starve. You do it out of love.
• At a certain point, you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening.
• It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping God may wake someday and take offense, or the waking God may draw us out to where we can never return.
• We are here to witness the creation and to abet it. We are here to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed. Together we notice not only each mountain shadow and each stone on the beach but, especially, we notice the beautiful faces and complex natures of each other. We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us. We witness our generation and our times. We watch the weather. Otherwise, creation would be playing to an empty house.

• No one escapes the wilderness on the way to the promised land.
• Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.
• Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.
• The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less.
• 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. . . . Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.

• Make connections; let rip; and dance where you can.
• 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.
• How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. 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. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living.
• You can’t test courage cautiously.
• 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?

• I wake expectant, hoping to see a new thing.
• We are here on the planet only once, and might as well get a feel for the place.
• I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam.
• Push it. examine all things intensely and relentlessly.
• If we listened to our intellect, we’d never have a love affair… or go into business. You’ve got to jump off cliffs and build your wings on the way down.

• We live in all we seek.
• 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. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wondering awed about on a splintered wreck I’ve come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty bats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them.
• There is always the temptation in life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for years on end. It is all so self conscience, so apparently moral…But I won’t have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous…more extravagant and bright. We are…raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus.
• Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.
• I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers.

• Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.
• Nature seems to exult in abounding radicality, extremism, anarchy. If we were to judge nature by its common sense or likelihood, we wouldn’t believe the world existed. In nature, improbabilities are the one stock in trade. The whole creation is one lunatic fringe. … No claims of any and all revelations could be so far-fetched as a single giraffe.
• 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.
• We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us.
• The world knew you before you knew the world.

• No child on earth was ever meant to be ordinary, and you can see it in them, and they know it, too, but then the times get to them, and the wear out their brains learning what folks expect, and spend their strength trying to rise over those same folks.
• We wake, if ever at all, to mystery.
• The point of the dragonfly’s terrible lip, the giant water bug, birdsong, or the beautiful dazzle and flash of sunlighted minnows,is not that it all fits together like clockwork–for it doesn’tbut that it all flows so freely wild, like the creek, that it all surges in such a free, finged tangle. Freedom is the world’s water and weather, the world’s nourishment freely given, its soil and sap: and the creator loves pizzazz.
• Caring passionately about something isn’t against nature, and it isn’t against human nature. It’s what we’re here to do.
• Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?

• I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.
• There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by.
• The real and proper question is: why is it beautiful?
• The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.
• After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn’t flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.

• Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.
• The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.
• 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 inexhaustible tale. So many things have been shown so to me on these banks, so much light has illumined me by reflection here where the water comes down, that I can hardly believe that this grace never flags, that the pouring from ever-renewable sources is endless, impartial, and free.
• You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it.
• Write about winter in the summer. Describe Norway as Ibsen did, from a desk in Italy; describe Dublin as James Joyce did, from a desk in Paris. Willa Cather wrote her prairie novels in New York City; Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn in Hartford, Connecticut. Recently, scholars learned that Walt Whitman rarely left his room.

• The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit’s one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself like a once-blind man unbound. The gaps are the clefts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fiords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock-more than a maple-universe.
• A work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight. It is barely domesticated, a mustang on which you one day fastened a halter, but which now you cannot catch. It is a lion you cage in your study. As the work grows, it gets harder to control; it is a lion growing in strength. You must visit it every day and reassert your mastery over it. If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the door to its room. You enter its room with bravura, holding a chair at the thing and shouting, “Simba!
• When I was six or seven years old, growing up in Pittsburgh, I used to take a precious penny of my own and hide it for someone else to find. I was greatly excited at the thought of the first lucky passerby who would receive a gift in this way, regardless of merit, a free gift from the universe. . . . I’ve been thinking about seeing. There are lots of things to see, unwrapped gifts and free surprises. The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand.
• We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all.
• The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest.

Annie Dillard’s words are not mere expressions but whispers of wisdom that echo through the corridors of our minds long after they are read. They serve as catalysts for introspection, inviting us to perceive the world with renewed wonder and a heightened sense of appreciation. As we bid adieu to this collection of her quotes, let us carry within us the spark ignited by her profound observations. May her words continue to kindle the flames of curiosity, urging us to seek beauty, meaning, and profound understanding in the tapestry of life’s experiences. For in Annie Dillard quote, we find not just inspiration but a mirror reflecting the intricate and awe-inspiring beauty of our existence.

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