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Push it. examine all things intensely and relentlessly.

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
Things
Relentlessly
Intensely
Examine
Push

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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Put yourself out of your misery.
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I had good innings, as the British say. I wrote for 38 years at the top of my form, and I wanted to quit on a high note.
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Does anything eat flowers. I couldn't recall having seen anything eat a flower - are they nature's privileged pets?
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You can serve or you can sing, and wreck your heart in prayer, working the world's hard work.
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Doing something does not require discipline. It creates its own discipline - with a little help from caffeine.
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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.
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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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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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I noticed this process of waking, and predicted with terrifying logic that one of these years not far away I would be awake continuously and never slip back, and never be free of myself again.
Annie Dillard
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It could be that our faithlessness is a cowering cowardice born of our very smallness, a massive failure of imagination... If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldnt believe the world existed.
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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The dear, stupid body is as easily satisfied as a spaniel.
Annie Dillard
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When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner's pick, a wood carver's gouge, a surgeon's probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year.
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Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.
Annie Dillard
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In literary history, generation follows generation in a rage.
Annie Dillard
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The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.
Annie Dillard
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Make connections let rip and dance where you can.
Annie Dillard
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The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.
Annie Dillard
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It makes more sense to write one big book - a novel or nonfiction narrative - than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all you possess and learn.
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