Annie Dillard Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
-- Annie DillardSource : "The Writing Life". Book by Annie Dillard, 1989.
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“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 -
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“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 -
“You can't test courage cautiously.”
-- Annie DillardSource : Annie Dillard (2016). “An American Childhood”, p.102, Canongate Books
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“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 DillardSource : Annie Dillard (2016). “The Abundance”, p.88, Canongate Books
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“Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?”
-- Annie Dillard -
“Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.”
-- Annie Dillard -
“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 -
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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 -
“Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.”
-- Annie DillardSource : Annie Dillard (2011). “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek”, p.145, Hymns Ancient and Modern Ltd
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“The way we live our days, is the way we live our lives.”
-- Annie Dillard -
“The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper; I cannot quite make it out.”
-- Annie Dillard -
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“A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.”
-- Annie Dillard -
“Crystals grew inside rock like arithmetic flowers. They lengthened and spread, added plane to plane in an awed and perfect obedience to an absolute geometry that even stones - maybe only the stones - understood.”
-- Annie Dillard -
“There is always the temptation in life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for years on end. It is all so self conscience, so apparently moral...But I won't have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous...more extravagant and bright. We are...raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus.”
-- 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 -
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“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 -
“Last forever!' Who hasn't prayed that prayer? You were lucky to get it in the first place. The present is a freely given canvas. That it is constantly being ripped apart and washed downstream goes without saying.”
-- Annie Dillard -
“As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.”
-- Annie Dillard -
“Buddhism notes that it is always a mistake to think your soul can go it alone.”
-- Annie Dillard -
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“The reader's ear must adjust down from loud life to the subtle, imaginary sounds of the written word. An ordinary reader picking up a book can't yet hear a thing; it will take half an hour to pick up the writing's modulations, its ups and downs and louds and softs.”
-- Annie Dillard -
“I cannot imagine a sorrier pursuit than struggling for years to write a book that attempts to appeal to people who do not read in the first place.”
-- Annie Dillard -
“The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside by a generous hand. But- and this is the point- who gets excited by a mere penny? But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days.”
-- Annie Dillard -
“Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?”
-- Annie Dillard -
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“I alternate between thinking of the planet as home - dear and familiar stone hearth and garden - and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners.”
-- Annie Dillard -
“Make connections; let rip; and dance where you can.”
-- Annie DillardSource : Annie Dillard (2011). “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek”, p.97, Hymns Ancient and Modern Ltd
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