Quote

I had hopes for my rough edges. I wanted to use them as a can opener, to cut myself a hole in the world's surface and exit through 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
Surface
Cutting
Opener
Use
Exit
Wanted
Hole
World
Hopes
Rough
Holes
Edges

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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I cannot cause light the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam.
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He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write. He is careful of what he learns, for that is what he will know.
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You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then-and only then-it is handed to you.
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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 come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.
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Landscape consists in the multiple, overlapping intricacies and forms that exist in a given space at a moment in time.
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Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.
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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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Private life, book life, took place where words met imagination without passing through the world.
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I woke at intervals until . . . the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not.
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The mind itself is an art object. It is a Mondrian canvas onto whose homemade grids it fits its own preselected products. Our knowledge is contextual and only contextual. Ordering and invention coincide: we call their collaboration knowledge.
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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.
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We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us.
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For writing a first draft requires from the writer a peculiar internal state which ordinary life does not induce. ... how to set yourself spinning?
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Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don't affair. A fish flashes, then dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much salt. Deer apparently ascend bodily into heaven the brightest oriole fades into leaves.
Annie Dillard
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The way we live our days, is the way we live our lives.
Annie Dillard
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The mind wants the world to return its love, or its awareness the mind wants to know all the world, and all eternity, and God.
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It's a little silly to finally learn how to write at this age. But I long ago realized I was secretly sincere.
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The body of literature, with its limits and edges, exists outside some people and inside others. Only after the writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature.
Annie Dillard
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What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
Annie Dillard