Quote

I would like to live. . . open to time and death painlessly, noticing everything, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will.

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
Time
Open
Life
Death
Like
Given
Painlessly
Remember
Noticing
Live
Pointed
Everything
Remembering
Nothing
Choosing
Would
Fierce

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.
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What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
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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. It is hard to desecrate a grove and change your mind. The very holy mountains are keeping mum. We doused the burning bush and cannot rekindle it we are lighting matches in vain under every green tree.
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If you're going to publish a book, you probably are going to make a fool of yourself.
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I'm a housewife: I spend far more time on housework than anything else.
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I never met a man who was shaken by a field of identical blades of grass. An acre of poppies and a forest of spruce boggle no one's mind.
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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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Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf
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You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you hear it: There is nothing there...You feel the world's word as a tension, a hum, a single chorused note everywhere the same. This is it: This hum is the silence.
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The point of going somewhere like the Napo River in Ecuador is not to see the most spectacular anything. It is simply to see what is there.
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How you spend your days is how you spend your life.
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No one can help you if you're stuck in a work. Only you can figure a way out, because only you can see the work's possibilities.
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People who read are not too lazy to turn on the television they prefer books.
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No child on earth was ever meant to be ordinary, and you can see it in them, and they know it, too, but then the times get to them, and the wear out their brains learning what folks expect, and spend their strength trying to rise over those same folks.
Annie Dillard
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The universe is illusion merely, not one speck of it real, and we are not only its victims, falling always into or smashed by a planet slung by the sun-but also its captives, bound by the mineral-made ropes of our senses.
Annie Dillard
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Every day is a god, each day is a god, and holiness holds forth in time.
Annie Dillard
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Are you living just a little and calling that life?
Annie Dillard
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Admire the world for never ending on you -- as you would an opponent, without taking your eyes away from him, or walking away.
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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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