Quote

Crystals grew inside rock like arithmetic flowers. They lengthened and spread, added plane to plane in an awed and perfect obedience to an absolute geometry that even stones - maybe only the stones - understood.

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
Like
Flower
Obedience
Lengthened
Understood
Flowers
Awed
Inside
Absolutes
Arithmetic
Grew
Absolute
Crystals
Maybe
Spread
Geometry
Perfect
Stones
Plane
Fear
Rock
Added
Even
Rocks
Planes

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Nothing on earth is more gladdening than knowing we must roll up our sleeves and move back the boundaries of the humanly possible once more.
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I'm a housewife: I spend far more time on housework than anything else.
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I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.
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It could be that our faithlessness is a cowering cowardice born of our very smallness, a massive failure of imagination... If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldnt believe the world existed.
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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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The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper I cannot quite make it out.
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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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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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The Pulitzer is more useful than meaningful.
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Who and of what import were the men whose bones bulk the Great Wall, the thirty million Mao starved, or the thirty million children not yet five who die each year now? Why, they are the insignificant others, of course living or dead, they are just some of the plentiful others...And you? To what end were we billions of oddballs born?
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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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I know only enough of God to want to worship him, by any means ready to hand.
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The life of sensation is the life of greed it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less.
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The world is wider in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain and Lazarus.
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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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There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.
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People who read are not too lazy to turn on the television they prefer books.
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For all the insularity of the old guard, Pittsburgh was always an open and democratic town.
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The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.
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Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.
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