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
Keep
Ashes
Give
Destructive
Anything
Impulse
Find
Safe
Giving
Becomes
Abundantly
Learned
Similarly
Open
Shameful
Lost
Freely

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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.
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I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.
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The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.
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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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What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.
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There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.
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The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.
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Push it. examine all things intensely and relentlessly.
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God gave me a talent to draw. I 'owed' it to him to develop the talent.
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It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.
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Write as if you are dying.
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