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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.

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
Learn
Write
Littles
Secretly
Little
Sincere
Writing
Silly
Long
Realized
Finally
Age

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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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.
Annie Dillard
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I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as a dying friend. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.
Annie Dillard
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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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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.
Annie Dillard
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The way you live your days is the way you live your life.
Annie Dillard
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But enough is enough. One turns at last even from glory itself with a sigh of relief. From the depths of mystery, and even from the heights of splendor, we bounce back and hurry for the latitudes of home.
Annie Dillard
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Self-consciousness is the curse of the city and all that sophistication implies.
Annie Dillard
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Having chosen this foolishness, I was a free being. How could the world ever stop me, how could I betray myself, if I was not afraid?
Annie Dillard
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Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you.
Annie Dillard
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Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.
Annie Dillard
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A shepherd on a hilltop who looks at a mess of stars and thinks, ‘There’s a hunter, a plow, a fish,’ is making mental connections that have as much real force in the universe as the very fires in those stars themselves.
Annie Dillard
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Geography is the key, the crucial accident of birth. A piece of protein could be a snail, a sea lion, or a systems analyst, but it had to start somewhere. This is not science it is merely metaphor. And the landscape in which the protein starts shapes its end as surely as bowls shape water.
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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If I actually believed that the progress of human understanding depended on our crop of contemporary novelists, I would shoot myself.
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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The mind of the writer does indeed do something before it dies, and so does its owner, but I would be hard put to call it living.
Annie Dillard
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A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order - willed, faked, and so brought into being.
Annie Dillard
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Painters work from the ground up. The latest version of a painting overlays earlier versions, and obliterates them. Writers, on the other hand, work from left to right. The discardable chapters are on the left.
Annie Dillard
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A schedule defends from chaos and whim. A net for catching days.
Annie Dillard
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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