Quote

The painter... does not fit the paints to the world. He most certainly does not fit the world to himself. He fits himself to the paint. The self is the servant who bears the paintbox and its inherited contents.

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
Certainly
Contents
Doe
Inherited
Self
Fits
World
Servant
Painter
Fit
Paint
Bears
Paints

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Nothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves.
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We wake, if ever at all, to mystery.
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I worked so hard all my life, and all I want to do now is read.
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If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed.
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Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf
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I don't know what it is about fecundity that so appalls. I suppose it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonishingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful, and that with extravagance goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives.
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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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Put yourself out of your misery.
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The more you read, the more you will write. The better the stuff you read, the better the stuff you will write.
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You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then-and only then-it is handed to you.
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I still try to keep my eyes open. I'm always on the lookout for antlion traps in sandy soil, monarch pupae near milkweed, skipper larvae in locust leaves. These things are utterly common, and I've not seen one
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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.
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People who read are not too lazy to turn on the television they prefer books.
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The surest sign of age is loneliness.
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These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.
Annie Dillard
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The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.
Annie Dillard
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Could two live that way? Could two live under the wild rose, and explore by the pond, so that the smooth mind of each is as everywhere present to the other, and as received and as unchallenged, as falling snow?
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The silence is all there is. It is the alpha and the omega, it is God's brooding over the face of the waters it is the blinded note of the ten thousand things, the whine of wings. You take a step in the right direction to pray to this silence, and even to address the prayer to World. Distinctions blur. Quit your tents. Pray without ceasing.
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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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As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.
Annie Dillard