I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.
- Annie Dillard
Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.
What can we make of the inexpressible joy of children? It is a kind of gratitude.
She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live
The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.
There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading -- that is a good life.
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
Spend the afternoon, you can't take it with you.
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...give it, give it all, give it now.
You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.
Nothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves.
More Quotes
If you quit once it becomes a habit. Never quit!
Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.
May you live all the days of your life.
Show me a family of readers, and I will show you the people who move the world.
There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.
It is not how old you are, but how you are old.
Religion is the fashionable substitute for belief.
A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together.
We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity; more than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.