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I worked so hard all my life, and all I want to do now is read.

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
Worked
Read
Hard
Life

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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I am sorry I ran from you. I am still running, running from that knowledge, that eye, that love from which there is no refuge. For you meant only love, and love, and I felt only fear, and pain. So once in Israel love came to us incarnate, stood in the doorway between two worlds, and we were all afraid.
Annie Dillard
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The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper I cannot quite make it out.
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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Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.
Annie Dillard
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I still try to keep my eyes open. I'm always on the lookout for antlion traps in sandy soil, monarch pupae near milkweed, skipper larvae in locust leaves. These things are utterly common, and I've not seen one
Annie Dillard
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We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall.
Annie Dillard
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I had good innings, as the British say. I wrote for 38 years at the top of my form, and I wanted to quit on a high note.
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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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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I'm a housewife: I spend far more time on housework than anything else.
Annie Dillard
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You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it... The vision is not so much destroyed, exactly, as it is, by the time you have finished, forgotten. It has been replaced by this changeling.
Annie Dillard
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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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Those of us who read carried around with us like martyrs a secret knowledge, a secret joy, and a secret hope: There is a life worth living where history is still taking place there are ideas worth dying for, and circumstances where courage is still prized.
Annie Dillard
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Nothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves.
Annie Dillard
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[Insects] are not only cold-blooded, and green- and yellow-blooded, but are also cased in a clacking horn. They have rigid eyes and brains strung down their backs. But they make up the bulk of our comrades-at-life, so I look to them for a glimmer of companionship.
Annie Dillard
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I am a fugitive and a vagabond, a sojourner seeking signs.
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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Make connections let rip and dance where you can.
Annie Dillard
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I break up through the skin of awareness a thousand times a day, as dolphins burst through seas, and dive again, and rise, and dive.
Annie Dillard
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Novels written with film contracts in mind have a faint but unmistakable, and ruinous, odor.
Annie Dillard