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Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.
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
Desks
Cranking
Engines
Midair
Keeps
Spin
Belief
Gears
Turns
Belt
Keep
Belts
Work
Engine
Desk
More quotes by Annie Dillard
We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all.
Annie Dillard
For all the insularity of the old guard, Pittsburgh was always an open and democratic town.
Annie Dillard
You do what you do out of your private love of the thing itself.
Annie Dillard
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?
Annie Dillard
Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.
Annie Dillard
We are here on the planet only once, and might as well get a feel for the place.
Annie Dillard
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.
Annie Dillard
Time is the continuous loop, the snakeskin with scales endlessly overlapping without beginning or end, or time is an ascending spiral if you will, like a child's toy Slinky.
Annie Dillard
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.
Annie Dillard
The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.
Annie Dillard
All my books started out as extravagant and ended up pure and plain.
Annie Dillard
Writers serve as the memory of a people. They chew over our public past.
Annie Dillard
I would like to live. . . open to time and death painlessly, noticing everything, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will.
Annie Dillard
When I first read the words 'introvert' and 'extrovert' when I was 10, I thought I was both.
Annie Dillard
The life of sensation is the life of greed it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less.
Annie Dillard
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.
Annie Dillard
The sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain. This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is.
Annie Dillard
The point of going somewhere like the Napo River in Ecuador is not to see the most spectacular anything. It is simply to see what is there.
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
She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.
Annie Dillard
