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The surest sign of age is loneliness.

Annie Dillard

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Annie Dillard
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: April 30
Author
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Pittsburg
Pennsylvania
Annie Dillard Doak
Surest
Aging
Loneliness
Sign
Age
Time

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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When I first read the words 'introvert' and 'extrovert' when I was 10, I thought I was both.
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Buddhism notes that it is always a mistake to think your soul can go it alone.
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People who read are not too lazy to turn on the television they prefer books.
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Your feelings are none of your business.
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The way you live your days is the way you live your life.
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Then why did you tell me?
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I woke at intervals until . . . the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not.
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Almost all of my many passionate interests, and my many changes of mind, came through books. Books prompted the many vows I made to myself.
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Who and of what import were the men whose bones bulk the Great Wall, the thirty million Mao starved, or the thirty million children not yet five who die each year now? Why, they are the insignificant others, of course living or dead, they are just some of the plentiful others...And you? To what end were we billions of oddballs born?
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Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you.
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An Eskimo shaman said, Life's greatest danger lies in the fact that man's food consists entirely of souls.
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We live in all we seek.
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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.
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Nature seems to exult in abounding radicality, extremism, anarchy. If we were to judge nature by its common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed. In nature, improbabilities are the one stock in trade. The whole creation is one lunatic fringe. ... No claims of any and all revelations could be so far-fetched as a single giraffe.
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The universe that suckled us is a monster that does not care if we live or die--it does not care if it itself grinds to a halt. It is a beast running on chance and death, careening from nowhere to nowhere. It is fixed and blind, a robot programmed to kill. We are free and seeing we can only try to outwit it at every turn to save our lives.
Annie Dillard
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[Insects] are not only cold-blooded, and green- and yellow-blooded, but are also cased in a clacking horn. They have rigid eyes and brains strung down their backs. But they make up the bulk of our comrades-at-life, so I look to them for a glimmer of companionship.
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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
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You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it... The vision is not so much destroyed, exactly, as it is, by the time you have finished, forgotten. It has been replaced by this changeling.
Annie Dillard
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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
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It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale.
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