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Spirit Quotes by Annie Dillard

14 Spirit quotes by Annie Dillard

All Spirit quotes Annie Dillard’s page

Annie Dillard’s fourteen reflections on spirit weave her keen observational eye with a contemplative tone, inviting readers to notice the subtle miracles that stir the inner life. Her prose feels both intimate and expansive, a quiet invitation to mindfulness.

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We wake, if ever at all, to mystery.

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Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.

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The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and…

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“What I call innocence is the spirit's unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once…

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Even if things are as bad as they could possible be, and as meaningless, then matters of truth are themselves indifferent; we…

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I feel as though I stand at the foot of an infinitely high staircase, down which some exuberant spirit is flinging tennis…

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“I have often noticed that these things, which obsess me, neither bother nor impress other people even slightly. I am horribly apt…

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Hasidism has a tradition that one of man's purposes is to assist God in the work of redemption by "hallowing" the things…

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The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit's one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that…

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I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam. It is…

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What do I make of all this texture? What does it mean about the kind of world in which I have been…

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As a thinker I keep discovering that beauty itself is as much a fact, and a mystery...I consider nature's facts -- its…

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There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days…

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“In the great meteor shower of August, the Perseid, I wail all day for the shooting stars I miss. They’re out there…

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More by Annie Dillard

Like everyone in his right mind, I feared Santa Claus.

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“This is a spendthrift economy; though nothing is lost, all is spent.”

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The creatures I seek do not want to be seen.

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Nothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves.

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We live in all we seek. The hidden shows up in too-plain sight. It lives captive on the face of the obvious - the…

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“...The mockingbird took a single step into the air and dropped. His wings were still folded against his sides as though he were singing…

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“Father had stretched out his long legs and was tilting back in his chair. Mother sat with her knees crossed, in blue slacks, smoking…

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I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done…

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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…

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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…

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The sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain. This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means…

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“What can we make of the inexpressible joy of children? It is a kind of gratitude, I think—the gratitude of the ten-year-old who wakes…

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“If we were to judge nature by its common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed. In nature, improbabilities are the one…

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For writing a first draft requires from the writer a peculiar internal state which ordinary life does not induce. ... how to set yourself spinning?

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I am a fugitive and a vagabond, a sojourner seeking signs.

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