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You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then-and only then-it is handed to you.

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
Handed
Search
Break
Brain
Back
Heart

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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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.
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I noticed this process of waking, and predicted with terrifying logic that one of these years not far away I would be awake continuously and never slip back, and never be free of myself again.
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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?
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According to Inuit culture in Greenland, a person possesses six or seven souls. The souls take the form of tiny people scattered throughout the body.
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At night I read and write, and things I have never understood become clear I reap the harvest of the rest of the year's planting
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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.
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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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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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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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The more you read, the more you will write. The better the stuff you read, the better the stuff you will write.
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She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.
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Self-consciousness is the curse of the city and all that sophistication implies.
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You can't test courage cautiously, so I ran hard and waved my arms hard, happy.
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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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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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Push it. examine all things intensely and relentlessly.
Annie Dillard
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How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and with that one, is what we are doing.
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If we listened to our intellect, we’d never have a love affair... or go into business. You’ve got to jump off cliffs and build your wings on the way down.
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When I first read the words 'introvert' and 'extrovert' when I was 10, I thought I was both.
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I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again.
Annie Dillard