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"The most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one's own most intimate sensitivity."
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"Be on time! If you have a 15-minute appointment-keep it at fifteen minutes unless there is mutual agreement to continue."

"Focus on your work. Do what you're great at. Don't compare yourself to others and or waste time criticizing the lives and work of others. Do what matters most to you and make a difference doing that."

"Do not indulge your weaknesses!"

"Why so eager to jump in and direct someone else's life when you can't stick to your own goals and resolutions?"

"The first person you have to conquer is you. This is because when at last you win over million people, the first person to bring you down could be you. Discipline yourself!"

"Growing nails breaks all conducts (aachar). When one conduct breaks, it breaks all other conducts."

"Furnishing was not a priority in the Citadel. Shelves, stools, tables... There was a rumor among the novices that priests towards the top of the hierarchy had golden furniture, but there was no sign of it here. The room was as severe as anything in the novices' quarters although it had, perhaps, a more opulent severity; it wasn't the forced bareness of poverty, but the starkness of intent."

"Only a changed person can live according to the law."

"Of all the forces in the universe, the hardest to overcome is the force of habit."
Explore more quotes by Annie Dillard


"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."


"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."


"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."


"The writer studies literature, not the world. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write."


"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."


"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."


"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."
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