What is important is the moment of opening a life and feeling it touch--with an electric hiss and cry--this speckled mineral sphere, our present world.
Annie DillardRead
Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Withholding knowledge is harmful; sharing enriches both the giver and receiver.
Annie Dillard emphasizes that the act of hoarding knowledge or experiences leads to personal deterioration and loss. When we refuse to share what we know, not only do we deprive others of potential growth, but we also diminish our own understanding and connection to the world around us, ultimately leaving ourselves with nothing but emptiness.
Themes
KnowledgeSharingGrowthWisdomCommunity
In practice
Example use cases
During a workshop, you can use this quote to encourage participants to share their insights.
More from Annie Dillard
All quotes βGeography is the key, the crucial accident of birth. A piece of protein could be a snail, a sea lion, or a systems analyst, but it had to start somewhere. This is not science; it is merely metaphor. And the landscape in which the protein "starts" shapes its end as surely as bowls shape water.
Annie DillardRead
Buddhism notes that it is always a mistake to think your soul can go it alone.
Annie DillardRead
It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave. It is hard to desecrate a grove and change your mind. The very holy mountains are keeping mum. We doused the burning bush and cannot rekindle it; we are lighting matches in vain under every green tree.
Annie DillardRead
To crank myself up I stood on a jack and ran myself up. I tightened myself like a bolt. I inserted myself in a vise-clamp and wound the handle till the pressure built. I drank coffee in titrated doses. It was a tricky business, requiring the finely tuned judgment of a skilled anesthesiologist. There was a tiny range within which coffee was effective, short of which it was useless, and beyond which, fatal.
Annie DillardRead
The world did not have me in mind; it had no mind. It was a coincidental collection of things and people, of items, an I myself was one such item...the things in the world did not necessarily cause my overwhelming feelings; the feelings were inside me, beneath my skin, behind my ribs, withing my skull. They were even, to some extent, under my control.
Annie DillardRead
Similar quotes
I simply taught, preached, wrote God's Word: otherwise I did nothing. The Word of God did it all.
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I have learned things in the dark that I could never have learned in the light, things that have saved my life over and over again, so that there is really only one logical conclusion. I need darkness as much as I need light.
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I think the big danger of madness is not madness itself, but the habit of madness. What I discovered during the time I spent in the asylum is that I could choose madness and spend my whole life without working, doing nothing, pretending to be mad. It was a very strong temptation.
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I think and think for months and years. Ninety-nine times, the conclusion is false. The hundredth time I am right.
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The great blessings of mankind are within us and within our reach; but we shut our eyes, and, like people in the dark, we fall foul upon the very thing we search for, without finding it.
Seneca The YoungerRead
The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean. I know this by my own experience, & to this day I cherish an unappeased bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my young life, who not only permitted but compelled me to read an unexpurgated Bible through before I was 15 years old. None can do that and ever draw a clean sweet breath again on this side of the grave.
Mark TwainRead