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It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as separating us from our creator, our very self-consciousness, is also the one thing that divides us from our fellow creatures. It was a bitter birthday present from evolution.

Annie Dillard
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The painter... does not fit the paints to the world. He most certainly does not fit the world to himself. He fits himself to the paint. The self is the servant who bears the paintbox and its inherited contents.
Annie Dillard
As a life's work, I would remember everything - everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net.
Annie Dillard
It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as separating us from our creator, our very self-consciousness, is also the one thing that divides us from our fellow creatures. It was a bitter birthday present from evolution.
Annie Dillard
As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.
Annie Dillard
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.
Annie Dillard
The writer studies literature, not the world. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write.
Annie Dillard
I noticed this process of waking, and predicted with terrifying logic that one of these years not far away I would be awake continuously and never slip back, and never be free of myself again.
Annie Dillard
The surest sign of age is loneliness.
Annie Dillard
The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.
Annie Dillard
Aim for the chopping block. If you aim for the wood, you will have nothing. Aim past the wood, aim through the wood; aim for the chopping block.
Annie Dillard
Eskimo: "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" Priest: "No, not if you did not know." Eskimo: "Then why did you tell me?"
Annie Dillard
There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable.
Annie Dillard
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
There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.
Annie Dillard
You can't test courage cautiously.
Annie Dillard
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
Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you.
Annie Dillard
I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.
Annie Dillard
There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by.
Annie Dillard
Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.
Annie Dillard
I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again.
Annie Dillard
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
Annie Dillard
People love pretty much the same things best. A writer looking for subject inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.
Annie Dillard
Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.
Annie Dillard
'Fecundity' is an ugly word for an ugly subject. It is ugly, at least, in the eggy animal world. I don't think it is for plants.
Annie Dillard
A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.
Annie Dillard
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.
Annie Dillard
All my books started out as extravagant and ended up pure and plain.
Annie Dillard
At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it.
Annie Dillard
Buddhism notes that it is always a mistake to think your soul can go it alone.
Annie Dillard
Eskimo: 'If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?' Priest: 'No, not if you did not know.' Eskimo: 'Then why did you tell me?'
Annie Dillard
God gave me a talent to draw. I 'owed' it to him to develop the talent.
Annie Dillard
How can people think that artists seek a name? There is no such thing as an artist - only the world, lit or unlit, as the world allows.
Annie Dillard
I can't dance anymore. Total knee replacements. I can't do anything anymore.
Annie Dillard
I never met a man who was shaken by a field of identical blades of grass. An acre of poppies and a forest of spruce boggle no one's mind.
Annie Dillard
I worked so hard all my life, and all I want to do now is read.
Annie Dillard
I'm a housewife: I spend far more time on housework than anything else.
Annie Dillard
If you're going to publish a book, you probably are going to make a fool of yourself.
Annie Dillard
It makes more sense to write one big book - a novel or nonfiction narrative - than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all you possess and learn.
Annie Dillard
It's a little silly to finally learn how to write at this age. But I long ago realized I was secretly sincere.
Annie Dillard
Just think: in all the clean, beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a blot; our planet alone has death.
Annie Dillard
Matters of taste are not, it turns out, moral issues.
Annie Dillard
Much has been written about the life of the mind.
Annie Dillard
Our family was on the lunatic fringe. My mother was always completely irrepressible. My father made crowd noises into a microphone.
Annie Dillard
People love pretty much the same things best. A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.
Annie Dillard
The Pulitzer is more useful than meaningful.
Annie Dillard
The mind of the writer does indeed do something before it dies, and so does its owner, but I would be hard put to call it living.
Annie Dillard
The notion of the infinite variety of detail and the multiplicity of forms is a pleasing one; in complexity are the fringes of beauty, and in variety are generosity and exuberance.
Annie Dillard