The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest.
ANNIE DILLARDI break up through the skin of awareness a thousand times a day, as dolphins burst through seas, and dive again, and rise, and dive.
More Annie Dillard Quotes
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The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.
ANNIE DILLARD -
The real and proper question is: why is it beautiful
ANNIE DILLARD -
There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by.
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I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.
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She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.
ANNIE DILLARD -
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 -
The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.
ANNIE DILLARD -
You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then-and only then-it is handed to you.
ANNIE DILLARD -
Adverbs are a sign that you’ve used the wrong verb.
ANNIE DILLARD -
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 -
Nature is, above all, profligate.
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Nature’s silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block.
ANNIE DILLARD -
Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.
ANNIE DILLARD -
You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.
ANNIE DILLARD -
I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam. It is possible, in deep space, to sail on solar wind. Light, be it particle or wave, has force: you rig a giant sail and go. The secret of seeing is to sail on solar wind.
ANNIE DILLARD -
Write about winter in the summer.
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What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.
ANNIE DILLARD -
Mountains are giant, restful, absorbent. You can heave your spirit into a mountain and the mountain will keep it, folded, and not throw it back as some creeks will. The creeks are the world with all its stimulus and beauty; I live there. But the mountains are home.
ANNIE DILLARD -
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.
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Nothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves.
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Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.
ANNIE DILLARD -
Make connections; let rip; and dance where you can.
ANNIE DILLARD -
I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.
ANNIE DILLARD -
These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.
ANNIE DILLARD -
You can serve or you can sing, and wreck your heart in prayer, working the world’s hard work.
ANNIE DILLARD -
Experiencing the present purely is being empty and hollow; you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.
ANNIE DILLARD