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Having chosen this foolishness, I was a free being. How could the world ever stop me, how could I betray myself, if I was not afraid?

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
Afraid
Stop
Free
Ever
World
Foolishness
Betray
Chosen

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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Put yourself out of your misery.
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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.
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Then why did you tell me?
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Geography is the key, the crucial accident of birth. A piece of protein could be a snail, a sea lion, or a systems analyst, but it had to start somewhere. This is not science it is merely metaphor. And the landscape in which the protein starts shapes its end as surely as bowls shape water.
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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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Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand - that of finding workable compromises between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us.
Annie Dillard
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Last forever!' Who hasn't prayed that prayer? You were lucky to get it in the first place. The present is a freely given canvas. That it is constantly being ripped apart and washed downstream goes without saying.
Annie Dillard
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How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and with that one, is what we are doing.
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An Inuit hunter asked the local missionary priest: If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell? No, said the priest, not if you did not know. Then why, asked the Inuit earnestly, did you tell me?
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I saw in a blue haze all the world poured flat and pale between the mountains
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The surest sign of age is loneliness.
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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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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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There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by.
Annie Dillard
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We are here to witness the creation and to abet it.
Annie Dillard
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I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.
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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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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Write as if you are dying.
Annie Dillard
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We wake, if ever at all, to mystery.
Annie Dillard