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"Do women in love feel as men do? Do men love as women love? His virgin bride shared her pipe-frame bed all smiles and laughter. When they were intimate to the last degree on that bed, did Lou's experience join his, did his experience match hers, during this moment and that moment?"
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"Treacherous people do not last only memories of their treason last.So will it last with emotions mixed, of love and hate for treacherous ones."

"Marriage is one sweet way in which one can taste heaven on earth. Similarly, I can also become hell on earth."

"... Good gracious, Jerry, you'll probably have to marry the girl.'Joanna was half serious, half laughing.It was at that moment that I made a very important discovery.'Damn it all,' I said. 'I don't mind if I do. In fact - I should like it.'A very funny expression came over Joanna's face. She got up and said dryly, as she went toward the door, 'Yes, I've known that for some time...'She left me standing, glass in hand, aghast at my new discovery."

"I wasn't in love with her. And she didn't love me. For me the question of love was irrelevant. What I sought was the sense of being tossed about by some raging, savage force, in the midst of which lay something absolutely crucial. I had no idea what that was. But I wanted to thrust my hand right inside her body and touch it, whatever it was."

"There is a right way and a wrong way to make contact with God."

"Stand together yet not too near together:For the pillars of the temples stand apart,And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each others shadow."

"He wasn't the type for displays of affection, either verbal or not. He was disgusted by couples that made out in the hallways between classes, and got annoyed at even the slightest sappy moments in movies. But I knew he cared about me: he just conveyed it more subtly, as concise with expressing this emotion as he was with everything else. It was in the way he'd put his hand on the small of my back, for instance, or how he'd smile at me when I said something that surprised him. Once I might have wanted more, but I'd come around to his way of thinking in the time we'd been together. And we were together, all the time. So he didn't have to prove how he felt about me. Like so much else, I should just know."

"Why?Why?Do you follow me and then unfollow me?Do you add me as a friend and then delete me?"

"He had never thought the question over clearly, but vaguely imagined that his wife had long suspected him of being unfaithful to her and was looking the other way. It even seemed to him that she, a worn-out, aged, no longer beautiful woman, not remarkable for anything, simple, merely a kind mother of a family, ought in all fairness to be indulgent. It turned out to be quite the opposite."

"He thought of her often, and he missed the companionship they'd once shared and the friendship that had been the bedrock of their marriage at its best."
Explore more quotes by Annie Dillard


"I smelled silt on the wind, turkey, laundry, leaves . . . my God what a world. There is no accounting for one second of it (267)."


"Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles."


"I was in no tent under leaves, sleepless and glad. There was no moon at all; along the world's coasts the sea tides would be springing strong. The air itself also has lunar tides; I lay still. Could I feel in the air an invisible sweep and surge, and an answering knock in the lungs? Or could I feel the starlight? Every minute on a square mile of this land one ten thousandth of an ounce of starlight spatters to earth. What percentage of an ounce did that make on my eyes and cheeks and arms, tapping and nudging as particles, pulsing and stroking as waves?"


"It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale."


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


"So it is that a writer writes many books. In each book, he intended several urgent and vivid points, many of which he sacrificed as the book's form hardened."


"Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark."


"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."


"There are 1,198,500,000 people alive now in China. To get a feel for what that means, simply take yourself - in all your singularity, importance, complexity, and love - and multiply by 1,198,500,000. See? Nothing to it."
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