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The surest sign of age is loneliness.

Annie Dillard

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Annie Dillard
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: April 30
Author
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Pittsburg
Pennsylvania
Annie Dillard Doak
Surest
Aging
Loneliness
Sign
Age
Time

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There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.
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But enough is enough. One turns at last even from glory itself with a sigh of relief. From the depths of mystery, and even from the heights of splendor, we bounce back and hurry for the latitudes of home.
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The irrational haunts the metaphysical.
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Divinity is not playful. The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensibl e earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and fleet. There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see.
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It should surprise no one that the life of the writer - such as it is - is colorless to the point of sensory deprivation. Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.
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Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.
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Time is the continuous loop, the snakeskin with scales endlessly overlapping without beginning or end, or time is an ascending spiral if you will, like a child's toy Slinky.
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When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner's pick, a wood carver's gouge, a surgeon's probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year.
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At a certain point, you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening.
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When I first read the words 'introvert' and 'extrovert' when I was 10, I thought I was both.
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What have we been doing all these centuries but trying to call God back to the mountain, or, failing that, raise a peep out of anything that isn't us? What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are not they both saying: Hello? We spy on whales and on interstellar radio objects we starve ourselves and pray till we're blue.
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It makes more sense to write one big book - a novel or nonfiction narrative - than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all you possess and learn.
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The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.
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Books swept me away, this way and that, one after the other I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them.
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What I call innocence is the spirit's unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once a receptiveness and total concentration.
Annie Dillard
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Time is the warp and matter the weft of the woven texture of beauty in space, and death is the hurling shuttle.
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I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.
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You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it... The vision is not so much destroyed, exactly, as it is, by the time you have finished, forgotten. It has been replaced by this changeling.
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The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.
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Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
Annie Dillard