Annie Dillard (b.1945,) original name Meta Annie Doak, is an American writer best known for meditative essays on the natural world. She is famous for her blend of literary, philosophical, theological, and scientific themes, regardless of the genre in which they appear.
Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Dillard began writing poetry in high school and then studied English in college. After writing a master’s thesis on Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, she moved to a cabin in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. She began keeping journals of her daily walks and reflected upon everything she saw, and on theology and literature. Her journals became the basis of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974;) this won the Pulitzer Prize when Dillard was just 29 years old. Critics hailed the work as an American original in the spirit of Walden.
Dillard’s Tickets for a Prayer Wheel (1974,) Holy the Firm (1977,) and Teaching a Stone to Talk (1982) explore similar themes. Living by Fiction (1982,) Encounters with Chinese Writers (1984,) and The Writing Life (1989) present her views of literary artistry and the writer’s role in society.
Dillard’s later works include For the Time Being (1999,) a collection of narrative nonfiction similar to Holy the Firm, and The Maytrees (2007,) her second novel.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Annie Dillard
No; we have been as usual asking the wrong question. It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singing. The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful?
—Annie Dillard
Topics: Beauty
At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then—and only then—it is handed to you.
—Annie Dillard
Topics: Writing
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
—Annie Dillard
Topics: Action, Carpe-diem
Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.
—Annie Dillard
Topics: Carpe-diem
Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.
—Annie Dillard
Topics: Excitement
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…
—Annie Dillard
Topics: Age, Growth
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.
—Annie Dillard
It could be that our faithlessness is a cowering cowardice born of our very smallness, a massive failure of imagination. If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldn’t believe the world existed.
—Annie Dillard
Topics: Imagination, Faith
There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.
—Annie Dillard
Topics: Weather, Light
I don’t know what it is about fecundity that so appalls. I suppose it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonishingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful, and that with extravagance goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives.
—Annie Dillard
Topics: Birth
I wake expectant, hoping to see a new thing.
—Annie Dillard
Topics: Beginnings
I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you’re going no matter how you live, cannot you part.
—Annie Dillard
If you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days.
—Annie Dillard
Topics: Simplicity
You can’t test courage cautiously.
—Annie Dillard
Topics: Courage
The dedicated life is the life worth living. You must give with your whole heart.
—Annie Dillard
Topics: Giving, Romance, Dedication, Commitment
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.
—Annie Dillard
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