Annie Dillard Quotes

We have to learn to die in every moment in order to be fully alive.

Death is a companion for all of us, whether we acknowledge it or not, whether we're aware of it or not, and it's not necessarily a terrible thing.

Above all, learn to live when you're dying.

I don't want to die in pain or in an undignified way, I don't want any of the people I love to die in, die painfully. But I'm aware of the fact that they may die before I do and I have to part with them and take the loss. The hardest thing of love is to let go. But I think I can get let go of almost anybody.

Never carry things on from the past. The past is gone. Every moment be rid of it, solved or unsolved. Drop it - and don't carry parts because those parts won't allow you to solve new problems that live in this moment. Live in this moment as totally as possible, and suddenly you will come to realized, that if you live it totally, it is solved. There is no need to solve it. Life is not a problem to be solved, it's a mystery to be lived.

When the striving ceases, there is life waiting as a gift.

Come back to square one, just the minimum bare bones. Relaxing with the present moment, relaxing with hopelessness, relaxing with death, not resisting the fact that things end, that things pass, that things have no lasting substance, that everything is changing all the time-that is the basic message.

When we put down ideas of what life should be like, we are free to wholeheartedly say yes to our life as it is.

Content with his past life, let him take leave of life like a satiated guest.

No matter how many times I tell you this, you're still thinking, thinking, judging, judging, coming to conclusions, trying to work out your life. You have to let go. Totally, absolutely, completely. You have to let go so completely that you will feel no body, no mind, no pain, nothing.

I would like to be able to gently drift in and out of existence when I wanted to.

The present is burdened too much with the past. We have not time, in our earthly existence, to appreciate what is warm with life, and immediately around us.

Because you can get free of everything except the space where things have been

I love Death because he breaks the human pattern and frees us from pleasures too prolonged as well as from the pains of this world. It is pleasant, too, to remember that Death lies in our hands; he must come if we call him. ... I think if there were no death, life would be more than flesh and blood could bear.

The skill of letting go can be learned, and once learned you will enjoy living much more spontaneously.

We are all our own graveyards, I believe; we squat amongst the tombs of the people we were. If we're healthy, every day is a celebration, a Day of the Dead, in which we give thanks for the lives that we lived, and if we are neurotic we brood and mourn and wish that the past was still present.

Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it.

Only the present moment contains life.

You have to remember one life, one death–this one! To enter fully the day, the hour, the moment whether it appears as life or death, whether we catch it on the inbreath or outbreath, requires only a moment, this moment. And along with it all the mindfulness we can muster, and each stage of our ongoing birth, and the confident joy of our inherent luminosity. (24)

Death then, being the way and condition of life, we cannot love to live if we cannot bear to die.

All you realy need to do is accept this moment fully. You are then at ease in the here and now and at ease with yourself.

Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty.

Death is not the opposite of life, but the opposite of choice.