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I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.

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

Catch Cup Empty Experience Grace Hollow Present Waterfall
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
You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then-and only then-it is handed to you.
ANNIE DILLARD

Break Broken Heart Heart Search
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

Inspirational Live Spend Time
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.
ANNIE DILLARD

Answer Beauty Grace Performance Sense Thinking Try
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
It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.
ANNIE DILLARD

Breathe Glance Power See Time
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
These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.
ANNIE DILLARD

Deason Inspirational Present Pure
Nature is, above all, profligate.
ANNIE DILLARD

Nature One Liner
What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.
ANNIE DILLARD

Color Hide Holy Spread Surface
The real and proper question is: why is it beautiful
ANNIE DILLARD

Beautiful Nature Proper Question Real
Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.
ANNIE DILLARD

Afternoon Spend Travel Vacation
Adverbs are a sign that you’ve used the wrong verb.
ANNIE DILLARD

Use Writing Wrong
Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.
ANNIE DILLARD

Emergency Extend Kind Live Survival
Nothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves.
ANNIE DILLARD

Love Man She Woman
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
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

Care Learning Reading Writing
No one escapes the wilderness on the way to the promised land.
ANNIE DILLARD

Escape Land Promise Wild
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

Ansore Beauty Giant Home Mountain Spirit Throw Trekking
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
We live in all we seek.
ANNIE DILLARD

Live One Liner Seek
You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.
ANNIE DILLARD

Build Inspirational Jump Time Wings
We are here on the planet only once, and might as well get a feel for the place.
ANNIE DILLARD

Feeling Place Planet Travel
The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest.
ANNIE DILLARD

Comprehensive Earn Universe
The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.
ANNIE DILLARD

Alone Love Secret Writing

I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.

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I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.

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Popular Authors

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