Quote

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.

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
Work
Engine
Desk
Desks
Cranking
Engines
Midair
Keeps
Spin
Belief
Gears
Turns
Belt
Keep
Belts

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The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.
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The creative process obtains in all creative acts. So if I'm painting suddenly I'll see something that I didn't see before.
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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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It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave.
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For all the insularity of the old guard, Pittsburgh was always an open and democratic town.
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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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The mind wants the world to return its love, or its awareness the mind wants to know all the world, and all eternity, and God.
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Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you.
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I worked so hard all my life, and all I want to do now is read.
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About five years ago I saw a mockingbird make a straight vertical descent from the roof gutter of a four-story building. It was an act as careless and spontaneous as the curl of a stem or the kindling of a star.
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Geography 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.
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Push it. examine all things intensely and relentlessly.
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The dear, stupid body is as easily satisfied as a spaniel.
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I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.
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All my books started out as extravagant and ended up pure and plain.
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If you're going to publish a book, you probably are going to make a fool of yourself.
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Almost all of my many passionate interests, and my many changes of mind, came through books. Books prompted the many vows I made to myself.
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Ecstasy, I think, is a soul's response to the waves holiness makes as it nears.
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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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The creatures I seek do not want to be seen.
Annie Dillard