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I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.

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
Knew
Moment
Moments
Whole
Lifted
Never
Bell
Life
Struck
Bells
Inspiring

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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Buddhism notes that it is always a mistake to think your soul can go it alone.
Annie Dillard
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It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave.
Annie Dillard
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She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.
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Put yourself out of your misery.
Annie Dillard
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I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again.
Annie Dillard
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The courage of children and beasts is a function of innocence.
Annie Dillard
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The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper I cannot quite make it out.
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.
Annie Dillard
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Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.
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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How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
Annie Dillard
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Even if things are as bad as they could possible be, and as meaningless, then matters of truth are themselves indifferent we may as well please our sensibilities and, with as much spirit as we can muster, go out with a buck and a wing.
Annie Dillard
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The creative process obtains in all creative acts. So if I'm painting suddenly I'll see something that I didn't see before.
Annie Dillard
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Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don't affair. A fish flashes, then dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much salt. Deer apparently ascend bodily into heaven the brightest oriole fades into leaves.
Annie Dillard
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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.
Annie Dillard
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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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We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all.
Annie Dillard
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I cannot cause light the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam.
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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Who and of what import were the men whose bones bulk the Great Wall, the thirty million Mao starved, or the thirty million children not yet five who die each year now? Why, they are the insignificant others, of course living or dead, they are just some of the plentiful others...And you? To what end were we billions of oddballs born?
Annie Dillard