Quote

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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Annie Dillard
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: April 30
Author
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Pittsburg
Pennsylvania
Annie Dillard Doak
Lost
Freely
Keep
Ashes
Give
Destructive
Anything
Impulse
Find
Safe
Giving
Becomes
Abundantly
Learned
Similarly
Open
Shameful

More quotes by 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?
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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.
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Caring passionately about something isn't against nature, and it isn't against human nature. It's what we're here to do.
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What I call innocence is the spirit's unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once a receptiveness and total concentration.
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There is no whit less enlightenment under the tree by your street than there was under the Buddha's bo tree. I invite you to go sit under that tree by your street.
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I feel as though I stand at the foot of an infinitely high staircase, down which some exuberant spirit is flinging tennis ball after tennis ball, eternally, and the one thing I want in the world is a tennis ball.
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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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Cruelty is a mystery, and a waste of pain.
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Writers serve as the memory of a people. They chew over our public past.
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The courage of children and beasts is a function of innocence.
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Silence is not our heritage but our destiny we live where we want to live.
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if you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not.
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I think that the dying pray at the last not please but thank you, as a guest thanks his host at the door. Falling from airplanes the people are crying thank you, thank you, all down the air and the cold carriages draw up for them on the rocks.
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For all the insularity of the old guard, Pittsburgh was always an open and democratic town.
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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.
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At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it.
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We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence.
Annie Dillard
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When you write, you lay out a line of words. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory.
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The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.
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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.
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