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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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Annie Dillard
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: April 30
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Pittsburg
Pennsylvania
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More quotes by Annie Dillard
Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.
Annie Dillard
When I walk with a camera, I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment's light prints on my own silver gut. When I see this second way I am above all an unscrupulous observer.
Annie Dillard
When you write, you lay out a line of words. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory.
Annie Dillard
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
The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.
Annie Dillard
Our family was on the lunatic fringe. My mother was always completely irrepressible. My father made crowd noises into a microphone.
Annie Dillard
The world is wider in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain and Lazarus.
Annie Dillard
The silence is all there is. It is the alpha and the omega, it is God's brooding over the face of the waters it is the blinded note of the ten thousand things, the whine of wings. You take a step in the right direction to pray to this silence, and even to address the prayer to World. Distinctions blur. Quit your tents. Pray without ceasing.
Annie Dillard
The way we live our days, is the way we live our lives.
Annie Dillard
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
Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.
Annie Dillard
The novel is a game or joke shared between author and reader.
Annie Dillard
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
God gave me a talent to draw. I 'owed' it to him to develop the talent.
Annie Dillard
The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest.
Annie Dillard
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
There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world lit or unlit as the light allows. When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it?
Annie Dillard
I alternate between thinking of the planet as home - dear and familiar stone hearth and garden - and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners.
Annie Dillard
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
Buddhism notes that it is always a mistake to think your soul can go it alone.
Annie Dillard
