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Silence is not our heritage but our destiny we live where we want to live.

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
Silence
Live
Heritage
Destiny

More quotes by 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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All my books started out as extravagant and ended up pure and plain.
Annie Dillard
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The creative process obtains in all creative acts. So if I'm painting suddenly I'll see something that I didn't see before.
Annie Dillard
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Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.
Annie Dillard
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Just once I wanted a task that required all the joy I had. Day after day I had noticed that if I waited long enough, my strong unexpressed joy would dwindle and dissipate inside me, like a fire subsiding . . . . Just this once I wanted to let it rip.
Annie Dillard
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I don't know what it is about fecundity that so appalls. I suppose it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonishingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful, and that with extravagance goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives.
Annie Dillard
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Write as if you are dying.
Annie Dillard
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A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.
Annie Dillard
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You can serve or you can sing, and wreck your heart in prayer, working the world's hard work.
Annie Dillard
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If even rock was interesting, if even this ugliness was worth whole shelves at the library, required sophisticated tools to study, and inspired grown men to crack mountains and saw crystals--then what wasn't?
Annie Dillard
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We live in all we seek. The hidden shows up in too-plain sight. It lives captive on the face of the obvious - the people, events, and things of the day - to which we as sophisticated children have long since become oblivious. What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.
Annie Dillard
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Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.
Annie Dillard
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People who read are not too lazy to turn on the television they prefer books.
Annie Dillard
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I woke at intervals until . . . the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not.
Annie Dillard
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She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.
Annie Dillard
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Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.
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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It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave.
Annie Dillard
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Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.
Annie Dillard
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We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall.
Annie Dillard