Quote

There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world lit or unlit as the light allows. When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it?

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
Thing
Lit
World
Candle
Allows
Burning
Artist
Light
Looks
Unlit
Needs
Wick

More quotes by 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.
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I alternate between thinking of the planet as home - dear and familiar stone hearth and garden - and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners.
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The universe is illusion merely, not one speck of it real, and we are not only its victims, falling always into or smashed by a planet slung by the sun-but also its captives, bound by the mineral-made ropes of our senses.
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A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order - willed, faked, and so brought into being.
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Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a word to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and delight, the canary that sings on the skull.
Annie Dillard
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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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Just think: in all the clean, beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a blot our planet alone has death.
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Nothing on earth is more gladdening than knowing we must roll up our sleeves and move back the boundaries of the humanly possible once more.
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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.
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It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping God may wake someday and take offense, or the waking God may draw us out to where we can never return.
Annie Dillard
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According to Inuit culture in Greenland, a person possesses six or seven souls. The souls take the form of tiny people scattered throughout the body.
Annie Dillard
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I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you.
Annie Dillard
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Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?
Annie Dillard
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What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.
Annie Dillard
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All my books started out as extravagant and ended up pure and plain.
Annie Dillard
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You can't test courage cautiously.
Annie Dillard
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What have we been doing all these centuries but trying to call God back to the mountain, or, failing that, raise a peep out of anything that isn't us? What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are not they both saying: Hello? We spy on whales and on interstellar radio objects we starve ourselves and pray till we're blue.
Annie Dillard
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You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it... The vision is not so much destroyed, exactly, as it is, by the time you have finished, forgotten. It has been replaced by this changeling.
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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Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.
Annie Dillard