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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
Hard
Life
Worked
Read

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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When I first read the words 'introvert' and 'extrovert' when I was 10, I thought I was both.
Annie Dillard
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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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I can't dance anymore. Total knee replacements. I can't do anything anymore.
Annie Dillard
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I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.
Annie Dillard
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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
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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Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.
Annie Dillard
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Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?
Annie Dillard
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Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.
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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The interior life is often stupid.
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 are no events but thoughts and the heart's hard turning, the heart's slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times.
Annie Dillard
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As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.
Annie Dillard
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Like everyone in his right mind, I feared Santa Claus.
Annie Dillard
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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.
Annie Dillard
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You can serve or you can sing, and wreck your heart in prayer, working the world's hard work.
Annie Dillard
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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
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You can't test courage cautiously.
Annie Dillard
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Geography is the key, the crucial accident of birth. A piece of protein could be a snail, a sea lion, or a systems analyst, but it had to start somewhere. This is not science it is merely metaphor. And the landscape in which the protein starts shapes its end as surely as bowls shape water.
Annie Dillard