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

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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The real and proper question is: why is it beautiful?
Annie Dillard
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It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave. It is hard to desecrate a grove and change your mind. The very holy mountains are keeping mum. We doused the burning bush and cannot rekindle it we are lighting matches in vain under every green tree.
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Time is the continuous loop, the snakeskin with scales endlessly overlapping without beginning or end, or time is an ascending spiral if you will, like a child's toy Slinky.
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Does anything eat flowers. I couldn't recall having seen anything eat a flower - are they nature's privileged pets?
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Push it. examine all things intensely and relentlessly.
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I think the dying pray at the last not please, but thank you, as a guest thanks his host at the door.
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There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been.
Annie Dillard
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We wake, if ever at all, to mystery.
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Let the grass die. I let almost all of my indoor plants die from neglect while I was writing the book. There are all kinds of ways to live. You can take your choice. You can keep a tidy house, and when St. Peter asks you what you did with your life, you can say, I kept a tidy house, I made my own cheese balls.
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The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest.
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As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.
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Doing something does not require discipline. It creates its own discipline - with a little help from caffeine.
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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Could two live that way? Could two live under the wild rose, and explore by the pond, so that the smooth mind of each is as everywhere present to the other, and as received and as unchallenged, as falling snow?
Annie Dillard
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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.
Annie Dillard
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The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.
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.
Annie Dillard
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It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave.
Annie Dillard
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What is important is the moment of opening a life and feeling it touch--with an electric hiss and cry--this speckled mineral sphere, our present world.
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