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

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
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Education
Learn
Remember
Live
Would

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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Does anything eat flowers. I couldn't recall having seen anything eat a flower - are they nature's privileged pets?
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Cruelty is a mystery, and a waste of pain.
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Whenever an encounter between a writer of good will and a regular person of good will happens to touch on the subject of writing, each person discovers, dismayed, that good will is of no earthly use. The conversation cannot proceed.
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It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.
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Every spring he vowed to quit teaching school, and every summer he missed his pupils and searched for them on the streets.
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What I call innocence is the spirit's unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once a receptiveness and total concentration.
Annie Dillard
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Dan Gerber is one of our finest living poets.
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There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been.
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Nothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves.
Annie Dillard
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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
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Your freedom as a writer is not freedom of expression in the sense of wild blurting you may not let rip. It is life at its most free, if you are fortunate enough to be able to try it, because you select your materials, invent your task, and pace yourself.
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It should surprise no one that the life of the writer - such as it is - is colorless to the point of sensory deprivation. Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.
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I saw in a blue haze all the world poured flat and pale between the mountains
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The mind itself is an art object ... The mind is a blue guitar on which we improvise the song of the world.
Annie Dillard
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There is neither a proportional relationship, nor an inverse one, between a writer’s estimation of a work in progress & its actual quality. The feeling that the work is magnificent, & the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged.
Annie Dillard
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Skin was earth it was soil. I could see, even on my own skin, the joined trapezoids of dust specks God had wetted and stuck with his spit the morning he made Adam from dirt. Now, all these generations later, we people could still see on our skin the inherited prints of the dust specks of Eden.
Annie Dillard
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We are here to witness. There is nothing else to do with those mute materials we do not need. Until Larry teaches his stone to talk, until God changes his mind, or until the pagan gods slip back to their hilltop groves, all we can do with the whole inhuman array is watch it.
Annie Dillard
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A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.
Annie Dillard
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There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.
Annie Dillard
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Landscape consists in the multiple, overlapping intricacies and forms that exist in a given space at a moment in time.
Annie Dillard