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"You can read in the space of a coffin, and you can write in the space of a toolshed meant for mowers and spades."
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Exlpore more Skill quotes
"True dexterity is not just in books; It is giving from above, we learn it, it is nurtured, it is applied and it is developed. He who do not know what has been giving to him from above, shall never know how to use what he has been giving effectively and efficiently."
"If you dread ending up in the bunker, practice these tricky out-of-the-sand shots until you master them. Think of it as insurance-we all have learned that, once you know you can make that shot easily, you will seldom need to!"
"The skilled artisan uses the same iron to make a horseshoeAs he does for a polished mirror for the King."
"I have had an aversion to good spelling for sixty years and more, merely for the reason that when I was a boy there was not a thing I could do creditably except spell according to the book. It was a poor and mean distinction, and I early learned to disenjoy it. I suppose that this is because the ability to spell correctly is a talent, not an acquirement. There is some dignity about an acquirement, because it is a product of your own labor. It is earned, whereas to be able to do a thing merely by the grace of God, and not by your own effort, transfers the thing to our heavenly home--where possibly it is a matter of pride and satisfaction, but it leaves you naked and bankrupt."
"To be a better cook, cook more. To be a better writer, read more."
"A whetstone, though it cannot cut, may sharpen a knife that will."
"I learnt the theory of movement, which I still teach sometimes. I was very, very ambitious to learn a skill."
"He is the best sailor who can steer within fewest points of the wind and exact a motive power out of the greatest obstacles."
Explore more quotes by Annie Dillard
"The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside by a generous hand. But- and this is the point- who gets excited by a mere penny? But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days."
"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."
"Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation's short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit."
"Books swept me away, this way and that, one after the other; I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them."
"I like to be aware of a book as a piece of writing, and aware of its structure as a product of mind, and yet I want to be able to see the represented world through it. I admire artists who succeed in dividing my attention more or less evenly between the world of their books and the art of their books . . . so that a reader may study the work with pleasure as well as the world that it describes."
"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."
"Mountains are giant, restful, absorbent. You can heave your spirit into a mountain and the mountain will keep it, folded, and not throw it back as some creeks will. The creeks are the world with all its stimulus and beauty; I live there. But the mountains are home."
"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."
"Just think: in all the clean, beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a blot; our planet alone has death."
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