The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest.
ANNIE DILLARDAdverbs are a sign that you’ve used the wrong verb.
More Annie Dillard Quotes
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The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.
ANNIE DILLARD -
He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write. He is careful of what he learns, for that is what he will know.
ANNIE DILLARD -
Nothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves.
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Write about winter in the summer.
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I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.
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 -
These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.
ANNIE DILLARD -
Make connections; let rip; and dance where you can.
ANNIE DILLARD -
You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.
ANNIE DILLARD -
The real and proper question is: why is it beautiful
ANNIE DILLARD -
We live in all we seek.
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Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.
ANNIE DILLARD -
You can serve or you can sing, and wreck your heart in prayer, working the world’s hard work.
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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.
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The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.
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Nature is, above all, profligate.
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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 -
We are here on the planet only once, and might as well get a feel for the place.
ANNIE DILLARD -
The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper; I cannot quite make it out.
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 -
We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all.
ANNIE DILLARD -
I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as a dying friend. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.
ANNIE DILLARD -
What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.
ANNIE DILLARD -
She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.
ANNIE DILLARD -
You can’t test courage cautiously.
ANNIE DILLARD -
Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.
ANNIE DILLARD