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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.

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
Wings
Build
Business
Way
Cliffs
Never
Listened
Love
Jump
Affair
Intellect

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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Nature seems to exult in abounding radicality, extremism, anarchy. If we were to judge nature by its common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed. In nature, improbabilities are the one stock in trade. The whole creation is one lunatic fringe. ... No claims of any and all revelations could be so far-fetched as a single giraffe.
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.
Annie Dillard
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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
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Crystals grew inside rock like arithmetic flowers. They lengthened and spread, added plane to plane in an awed and perfect obedience to an absolute geometry that even stones - maybe only the stones - understood.
Annie Dillard
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About five years ago I saw a mockingbird make a straight vertical descent from the roof gutter of a four-story building. It was an act as careless and spontaneous as the curl of a stem or the kindling of a star.
Annie Dillard
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I woke at intervals until . . . the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not.
Annie Dillard
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Landscape consists in the multiple, overlapping intricacies and forms that exist in a given space at a moment in time.
Annie Dillard
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How you spend your days is how you spend your life.
Annie Dillard
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Aim for the chopping block. If you aim for the wood, you will have nothing. Aim past the wood, aim through the wood aim for the chopping block.
Annie Dillard
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I can't dance anymore. Total knee replacements. I can't do anything anymore.
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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Trees have a curious relationship to the subject of the present moment. There are many created things in the universe that outlive us, that outlive the sun, even, but I can't think about them. I live with trees.
Annie Dillard
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Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you.
Annie Dillard
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Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?
Annie Dillard
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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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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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Like any child, I slid into myself perfectly fitted, as a diver meets her reflection in a pool. Her fingertips enter the fingertips on the water, her wrists slide up her arms. The diver wraps herself in her reflection wholly, sealing it at the toes, and wears it as she climbs rising from the pool, and ever after.
Annie Dillard
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We still and always want waking.
Annie Dillard
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Nothing on earth is more gladdening than knowing we must roll up our sleeves and move back the boundaries of the humanly possible once more.
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