Education Quote by Annie Dillard

A lot hides in that polite verb phrase, “I would like.” Dillard isn’t announcing a breakthrough; she’s confessing a deficit. The line lands with the quiet embarrassment of someone who has accumulated knowledge, taste, even spiritual vocabulary, yet suspects she’s missed the main thing: the felt, practiced craft of being alive. It’s an admission that “living” can become abstract, outsourced to habit, work, and narration.

The pivot is “or remember.” Learning implies the future and effort; remembering implies the past and loss. Dillard collapses self-improvement and recovery into the same need, suggesting that whatever she’s after isn’t new information but a return to a competence we once had before we got trained out of it. That’s a very Dillard move: treating attention as both discipline and homecoming. The subtext is that modern life doesn’t just distract you; it makes you forget what counts as reality. You don’t merely fail to notice the world - you misplace your own capacity to be present inside it.

Context matters: Dillard’s writing sits in the long American tradition of spiritual-naturalist inquiry (Thoreau’s shadow is there), but she’s less interested in heroic solitude than in the daily fight for perception. The sentence works because it refuses the self-help posture. It’s modest, almost tentative, and that restraint makes it sharper: if a writer whose job is noticing still has to “learn, or remember,” then the rest of us are living on auto-pilot more often than we’d like to admit.