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I break up through the skin of awareness a thousand times a day, as dolphins burst through seas, and dive again, and rise, and dive.

Annie Dillard

The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less.
ANNIE DILLARD

Greed Life Requirement Sensation Spirit
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…give it, give it all, give it now.
ANNIE DILLARD

Giving Lose Play Time Writing
Nature’s silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block.
ANNIE DILLARD

Block Flake Mute Nature Silence World
There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by.
ANNIE DILLARD

Hard Time Life Live Shortage
Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.
ANNIE DILLARD

Afternoon Spend Travel Vacation
You can serve or you can sing, and wreck your heart in prayer, working the world’s hard work.
ANNIE DILLARD

Heart Prayer Serve Sing Work Hard World
The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.
ANNIE DILLARD

Creation Gesture Stuff
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

Darkness Demand Finding Inspirational Necessary Outside Requirement Stars
Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.
ANNIE DILLARD

Faint Life Mystery Surface
Write about winter in the summer.
ANNIE DILLARD

Summer Winter Writing
I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.
ANNIE DILLARD

Bell Experience Inspirational Life Lift Moments Struck
I break up through the skin of awareness a thousand times a day, as dolphins burst through seas, and dive again, and rise, and dive.
ANNIE DILLARD

Awareness Break Up Dive Rise Sea Skin Time
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.
ANNIE DILLARD

Grasp Necessary Obedient Passion Thinking
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.
ANNIE DILLARD

Book Happiness Literature Nature Night Reading Words
Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand – that of finding a workable compromise between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us.
ANNIE DILLARD

Absurd Business Compromise Fact Finding Hands Ideas Work
There are no events but thoughts and the heart’s hard turning, the heart’s slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times.
ANNIE DILLARD

Event Gossip Hard Heart Learning Love Time

I break up through the skin of awareness a thousand times a day, as dolphins burst through seas, and dive again, and rise, and dive.

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I break up through the skin of awareness a thousand times a day, as dolphins burst through seas, and dive again, and rise, and dive.

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