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

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About Annie Dillard

Portrait of Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard (née Doak; born April 30, 1945) is an American author, best known for her narrative prose in both fiction and nonfiction. She has published works of poetry, essays, prose, and literary criticism, as well as two novels and one memoir. Her 1974 book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek won...

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

—Annie Dillard

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Write about winter in the summer. Describe Norway as Ibsen did, from a desk in Italy; describe Dublin as James Joyce did, from a desk in Paris. Willa Cather wrote her prairie novels in New York City; Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn in Hartford. Recently, scholars learned that Walt Whitman rarely left his room.

—Annie Dillard

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The dying must often feel this way — steaming along just fine, while on ahead someone has torn up the rails.

—Annie Dillard

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I couldn't remember how to forget myself. I didn't want to think about myself, to reckon myself in, to deal with myself every livelong minute on top of everything else — but swerve as I might, I couldn't avoid it. I was a boulder blocking my own path. I was a dog barking between my own ears, a barking dog who wouldn't hush. So this was adolescence.

—Annie Dillard

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In the Koran, Allah asks, "The heaven and the earth and all in between, thinkest thou I made them in jest?" It's a good question. What do we think of the created universe, spanning an unthinkable void with an unthinkable profusion of forms? . . . If the giant water bug was not made in jest, was it then made in earnest?

—Annie Dillard

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We see achievement as purposeful and monolithic, like the sculpting of a massive tree trunk that has first to be brought from the forest and then shaped by long labor to assert the artist's vision, rather than something crafted from odds and ends, like a patchwork quilt, and lovingly used to warm different nights and bodies.

—Mary Catherine Bateson

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In forming a bridge between body and mind, dreams may be used as a springboard from which man can leap to new realms of experience lying outside his normal state of consciousness and enlarge his vision not only of himself, but also of the universe in which he lives.

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To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.

—George Orwell

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Many of us have no long-range vision in much of our struggle. We think only of the moment, this time, this place, this circumstance. But think of the ten generations of children that inherit love, and their children, and theirs. … Anyone can count the seeds of an apple. Who can count the apples in a seed?

—Stephen Covey

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Don’t do it. Don’t go to that job you hate. Do something you love today. Ride a roller coaster. Swim in the ocean. Go to the airport and get on the next flight to anywhere just for the fun of it. Maybe stop a spinning globe with your finger and then plan a trip to that very spot; even if it’s in the middle of the ocean you can go by boat. Eat some type of ethnic food you’ve never even heard of. Stop a stranger and ask her to explain her greatest fears and her secret hopes and aspirations in detail and then tell her you care because she is a human being. Sit down on the sidewalk and make pictures with colorful chalk. Close your eyes and try to see the world with your nose—allow smells to be your vision. Catch up on your sleep. Call an old friend you haven’t seen in years. Roll up your pant legs and walk into the sea. See a foreign film. Feed squirrels. Do anything! Something! Because you start a revolution one decision at a time, with each breath you take. Just don’t go back to that miserable place you go every day.

—Matthew Quick in Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock

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