Quote

I wake up thinking: What am I reading? What will I read next? I'm terrified that I'll run out, that I will read through all I want to, and be forced to learn wildflowers at last, to keep awake.

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
Learn
Terrified
Running
Forced
Keep
Awake
Next
Wake
Thinking
Reading
Lasts
Last
Read

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.
Annie Dillard
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I had hopes for my rough edges. I wanted to use them as a can opener, to cut myself a hole in the world's surface and exit through it.
Annie Dillard
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The novel is a game or joke shared between author and reader.
Annie Dillard
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We are here to abet creation and to witness to it, to notice each other's beautiful face and complex nature so that creation need not play to an empty house.
Annie Dillard
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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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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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Skin was earth it was soil. I could see, even on my own skin, the joined trapezoids of dust specks God had wetted and stuck with his spit the morning he made Adam from dirt. Now, all these generations later, we people could still see on our skin the inherited prints of the dust specks of Eden.
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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It should surprise no one that the life of the writer - such as it is - is colorless to the point of sensory deprivation. Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.
Annie Dillard
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How can people think that artists seek a name? A name, like a face, is something you have when you're not alone. There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world, lit or unlit as the light allows.
Annie Dillard
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Make connections let rip and dance where you can.
Annie Dillard
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I worked so hard all my life, and all I want to do now is read.
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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I never met a man who was shaken by a field of identical blades of grass. An acre of poppies and a forest of spruce boggle no one's mind.
Annie Dillard
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An Eskimo shaman said, Life's greatest danger lies in the fact that man's food consists entirely of souls.
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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You can't test courage cautiously, so I ran hard and waved my arms hard, happy.
Annie Dillard
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Nothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves.
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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Crystals grew inside rock like arithmetic flowers. They lengthened and spread, added plane to plane in an awed and perfect obedience to an absolute geometry that even stones - maybe only the stones - understood.
Annie Dillard