black
grey
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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

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
You can’t test courage cautiously.
ANNIE DILLARD

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

Color Hide Holy Spread Surface
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.
ANNIE DILLARD

Awareness Break Up Dive Rise Sea Skin Time
We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all.
ANNIE DILLARD

Control Fancy Sleep Switch
We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet.
ANNIE DILLARD

Encounter Feet Flick God Mercy
Write about winter in the summer.
ANNIE DILLARD

Summer Winter Writing
She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.
ANNIE DILLARD

Air Book Breathe Live Reading
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

Cool Eyes Flame Look See Spark Tinder Water
Books swept me away, this way and that, one after the other; I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them.
ANNIE DILLARD

According Away Believe Book Light Swept
The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper; I cannot quite make it out.
ANNIE DILLARD

Pronounce Quite Sea Whisper
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
Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.
ANNIE DILLARD

Emergency Extend Kind Live Survival
Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.
ANNIE DILLARD

Art Traffic Traning
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

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Annie Dillard Quotes