Annie Dillard Quotes and Sayings
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“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
-- Annie Dillard -
“A work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight. It is barely domesticated, a mustang on which you one day fastened a halter, but which now you cannot catch. It is a lion you cage in your study. As the work grows, it gets harder to control; it is a lion growing in strength. You must visit it every day and reassert your mastery over it. If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the door to its room. You enter its room with bravura, holding a chair at the thing and shouting, "Simba!”
-- Annie Dillard -
“The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.”
-- 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 -
“She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.”
-- Annie Dillard -
“Like any child, I slid into myself perfectly fitted, as a diver meets her reflection in a pool. Her fingertips enter the fingertips on the water, her wrists slide up her arms. The diver wraps herself in her reflection wholly, sealing it at the toes, and wears it as she climbs rising from the pool, and ever after.”
-- Annie Dillard -
“There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by.”
-- Annie Dillard -
“Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.”
-- Annie Dillard