Quote

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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Annie Dillard
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: April 30
Author
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Pittsburg
Pennsylvania
Annie Dillard Doak
Rise
Sea
Awareness
Dolphins
Thousand
Dive
Break
Seas
Times
Burst
Skin
Skins

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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Last forever!' Who hasn't prayed that prayer? You were lucky to get it in the first place. The present is a freely given canvas. That it is constantly being ripped apart and washed downstream goes without saying.
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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.
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Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand - that of finding workable compromises between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us.
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You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it to the page. The page is jealous and tyrannical the page is made of time and matter the page always wins.
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It should surprise no one that the life of the writer - such as it is - is colorless to the point of sensory deprivation. Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.
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Private life, book life, took place where words met imagination without passing through the world.
Annie Dillard
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Adverbs are a sign that you've used the wrong verb.
Annie Dillard
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The reader's ear must adjust down from loud life to the subtle, imaginary sounds of the written word. An ordinary reader picking up a book can't yet hear a thing it will take half an hour to pick up the writing's modulations, its ups and downs and louds and softs.
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We still and always want waking.
Annie Dillard
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How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
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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.
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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.
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Dan Gerber is one of our finest living poets.
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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Like everyone in his right mind, I feared Santa Claus.
Annie Dillard
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I work mornings only. I go out to lunch. Afternoons I play with the baby, walk with my husband, or shovel mail.
Annie Dillard
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A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.
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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Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me. This is easy to write, easy to read, and hard to believe.
Annie Dillard
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The interior life is often stupid.
Annie Dillard