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

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The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest.
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The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring.
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[Insects] are not only cold-blooded, and green- and yellow-blooded, but are also cased in a clacking horn. They have rigid eyes and brains strung down their backs. But they make up the bulk of our comrades-at-life, so I look to them for a glimmer of companionship.
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Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.
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The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper I cannot quite make it out.
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As a life's work, I would remember everything - everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net.
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I alternate between thinking of the planet as home - dear and familiar stone hearth and garden - and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners.
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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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According to Inuit culture in Greenland, a person possesses six or seven souls. The souls take the form of tiny people scattered throughout the body.
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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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I'm a housewife: I spend far more time on housework than anything else.
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Could two live that way? Could two live under the wild rose, and explore by the pond, so that the smooth mind of each is as everywhere present to the other, and as received and as unchallenged, as falling snow?
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Doing something does not require discipline. It creates its own discipline - with a little help from caffeine.
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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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All my books started out as extravagant and ended up pure and plain.
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Old memories are very easy to get except that once you write about something you've destroyed it.
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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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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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You can't test courage cautiously.
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Does anything eat flowers. I couldn't recall having seen anything eat a flower - are they nature's privileged pets?
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