I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.
ANNIE DILLARDWrite about winter in the summer.
More Annie Dillard Quotes
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The real and proper question is: why is it beautiful
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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 -
The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.
ANNIE DILLARD -
You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.
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The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.
ANNIE DILLARD -
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.
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It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.
ANNIE DILLARD -
Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.
ANNIE DILLARD -
We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all.
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You can serve or you can sing, and wreck your heart in prayer, working the world’s hard work.
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The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest.
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Nature is, above all, profligate.
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Caring passionately about something isn’t against nature, and it isn’t against human nature. It’s what we’re here to do.
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What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.
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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.
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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.
ANNIE DILLARD -
These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.
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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 -
The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.
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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.
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 -
I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.
ANNIE DILLARD -
People love pretty much the same things best. A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.
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Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.
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No one escapes the wilderness on the way to the promised land.
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