Quote

Don't save something good for a later place. Don't hold back from your students, from the poor, don't try to keep anything for yourself 'cause it'll turn to ashes.

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
Poor
Save
Keep
Later
Place
Students
Anything
Cause
Back
Hold
Trying
Turn
Something
Causes
Good
Turns
Ashes

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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Whenever an encounter between a writer of good will and a regular person of good will happens to touch on the subject of writing, each person discovers, dismayed, that good will is of no earthly use. The conversation cannot proceed.
Annie Dillard
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No one escapes the wilderness on the way to the promised land.
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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.
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The irrational haunts the metaphysical.
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The Pulitzer is more useful than meaningful.
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Writing a book is like rearing children -- willpower has very little to do with it. If you have a little baby crying in the middle of the night, and if you depend only on willpower to get you out of bed to feed the baby, that baby will starve. You do it out of love.
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I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers.
Annie Dillard
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I alternate between thinking of the planet as home - dear and familiar stone hearth and garden - and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners.
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Just once I wanted a task that required all the joy I had. Day after day I had noticed that if I waited long enough, my strong unexpressed joy would dwindle and dissipate inside me, like a fire subsiding . . . . Just this once I wanted to let it rip.
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Books swept me away, this way and that, one after the other I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them.
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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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In literary history, generation follows generation in a rage.
Annie Dillard
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By dipping us children in the Bible so often, they hoped, I think, to give our lives a serious tint, and to provide us with quaintly magnificent snatches of prayer to produce as charms while, say, being mugged for our cash or jewels.
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Caring passionately about something isn't against nature, and it isn't against human nature. It's what we're here to do.
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Our family was on the lunatic fringe. My mother was always completely irrepressible. My father made crowd noises into a microphone.
Annie Dillard
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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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At a certain point, you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening.
Annie Dillard
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I think that the dying pray at the last not please but thank you, as a guest thanks his host at the door. Falling from airplanes the people are crying thank you, thank you, all down the air and the cold carriages draw up for them on the rocks.
Annie Dillard
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The dear, stupid body is as easily satisfied as a spaniel.
Annie Dillard
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Self-consciousness is the curse of the city and all that sophistication implies.
Annie Dillard