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
Keep
Later
Place
Students
Anything
Cause
Back
Hold
Trying
Turn
Something
Causes
Good
Turns
Ashes
Poor
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I couldn't unpeach the peaches.
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The way to learn about a writer is to read the text. Or texts.
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Cruelty is a mystery, and a waste of pain.
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There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.
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All my books started out as extravagant and ended up pure and plain.
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It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.
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According to Inuit culture in Greenland, a person possesses six or seven souls. The souls take the form of tiny people scattered throughout the body.
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It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping God may wake someday and take offense, or the waking God may draw us out to where we can never return.
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Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.
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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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No one escapes the wilderness on the way to the promised land.
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You do what you do out of your private love of the thing itself.
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The mind itself is an art object ... The mind is a blue guitar on which we improvise the song of the world.
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Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.
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if you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not.
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I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers.
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I'm a housewife: I spend far more time on housework than anything else.
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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.
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One of the few things I know about writing is this: Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book, give it, give it all, give it now.
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Divinity is not playful. The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensibl e earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and fleet. There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see.
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