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The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.

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
Must
Giving
Dedicated
Heart
Romantic
Love
Worth
Life
Living
Give
Whole

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As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.
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Nature's silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block.
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Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand - that of finding workable compromises between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us.
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We wake, if ever at all, to mystery.
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I woke at intervals until . . . the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not.
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Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation's short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit.
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I couldn't unpeach the peaches.
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The dear, stupid body is as easily satisfied as a spaniel.
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The novel is a game or joke shared between author and reader.
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You do what you do out of your private love of the thing itself.
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We are here to witness. There is nothing else to do with those mute materials we do not need. Until Larry teaches his stone to talk, until God changes his mind, or until the pagan gods slip back to their hilltop groves, all we can do with the whole inhuman array is watch it.
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Your freedom as a writer is not freedom of expression in the sense of wild blurting you may not let rip. It is life at its most free, if you are fortunate enough to be able to try it, because you select your materials, invent your task, and pace yourself.
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Unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous.
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I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too.
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The universe that suckled us is a monster that does not care if we live or die--it does not care if it itself grinds to a halt. It is a beast running on chance and death, careening from nowhere to nowhere. It is fixed and blind, a robot programmed to kill. We are free and seeing we can only try to outwit it at every turn to save our lives.
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I'd seen a great many partial eclipses, but a partial eclipse has the same relation to a total eclipse as flirting with a man does to marrying him. It's completely different.
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When I teach, I preach. I thump the Bible. I exhort my students morally. I talk to them about the dedicated life.
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Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.
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These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.
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No one escapes the wilderness on the way to the promised land.
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