Quote

According to Inuit culture in Greenland, a person possesses six or seven souls. The souls take the form of tiny people scattered throughout the body.

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
Person
Six
Take
Tiny
Inuit
People
Seven
Greenland
Culture
Scattered
Form
Possesses
Body
Throughout
Persons
According
Soul
Souls

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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We are here on the planet only once, and might as well get a feel for the place.
Annie Dillard
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The courage of children and beasts is a function of innocence.
Annie Dillard
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If you're going to publish a book, you probably are going to make a fool of yourself.
Annie Dillard
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I work mornings only. I go out to lunch. Afternoons I play with the baby, walk with my husband, or shovel mail.
Annie Dillard
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Young children have no sense of wonder. They bewilder well, but few things surprise them. All of it is new to young children, after all, and equally gratuitous.
Annie Dillard
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Doing something does not require discipline. It creates its own discipline - with a little help from caffeine.
Annie Dillard
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One of the few things I know about writing is this: Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book, give it, give it all, give it now.
Annie Dillard
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At a certain point, you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening.
Annie Dillard
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Writing a book is like rearing children -- willpower has very little to do with it. If you have a little baby crying in the middle of the night, and if you depend only on willpower to get you out of bed to feed the baby, that baby will starve. You do it out of love.
Annie Dillard
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No, the point is not only does time fly and do we die, but that in these reckless conditions we live at all, and are vouchsafed, for the duration of certain inexplicable moments, to know it.
Annie Dillard
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As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.
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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Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation's short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit.
Annie Dillard
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Don't save something good for a later place. Don't hold back from your students, from the poor, don't try to keep anything for yourself 'cause it'll turn to ashes.
Annie Dillard
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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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The way to learn about a writer is to read the text. Or texts.
Annie Dillard
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Self-consciousness is the curse of the city and all that sophistication implies.
Annie Dillard
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Our family was on the lunatic fringe. My mother was always completely irrepressible. My father made crowd noises into a microphone.
Annie Dillard
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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.
Annie Dillard
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The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring. It is the sensation of a stunt pilot's turning barrel rolls, or an inchworm's blind rearing from a stem in search of a route. At its worst, it feels like alligator wrestling, at the level of the sentence.
Annie Dillard