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There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by.

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
Shortage
Days
Lives
Inspirational
Come
Hard
Good

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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Those of us who read carried around with us like martyrs a secret knowledge, a secret joy, and a secret hope: There is a life worth living where history is still taking place there are ideas worth dying for, and circumstances where courage is still prized.
Annie Dillard
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We wake, if ever at all, to mystery.
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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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The way you live your days is the way you live your life.
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If we listened to our intellect, we’d never have a love affair... or go into business. You’ve got to jump off cliffs and build your wings on the way down.
Annie Dillard
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Like everyone in his right mind, I feared Santa Claus.
Annie Dillard
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Let the grass die. I let almost all of my indoor plants die from neglect while I was writing the book. There are all kinds of ways to live. You can take your choice. You can keep a tidy house, and when St. Peter asks you what you did with your life, you can say, I kept a tidy house, I made my own cheese balls.
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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I cannot imagine a sorrier pursuit than struggling for years to write a book that attempts to appeal to people who do not read in the first place.
Annie Dillard
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Just once I wanted a task that required all the joy I had. Day after day I had noticed that if I waited long enough, my strong unexpressed joy would dwindle and dissipate inside me, like a fire subsiding . . . . Just this once I wanted to let it rip.
Annie Dillard
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When I teach, I preach. I thump the Bible. I exhort my students morally. I talk to them about the dedicated life.
Annie Dillard
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The surest sign of age is loneliness.
Annie Dillard
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You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it to the page. The page is jealous and tyrannical the page is made of time and matter the page always wins.
Annie Dillard
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No one escapes the wilderness on the way to the promised land.
Annie Dillard
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At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it.
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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Does anything eat flowers. I couldn't recall having seen anything eat a flower - are they nature's privileged pets?
Annie Dillard
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I saw in a blue haze all the world poured flat and pale between the mountains
Annie Dillard
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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
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I'd seen a great many partial eclipses, but a partial eclipse has the same relation to a total eclipse as flirting with a man does to marrying him. It's completely different.
Annie Dillard