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

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The way we live our days, is the way we live our lives.
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It's a little silly to finally learn how to write at this age. But I long ago realized I was secretly sincere.
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What is important is the moment of opening a life and feeling it touch--with an electric hiss and cry--this speckled mineral sphere, our present world.
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The interior life is often stupid.
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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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why did I have to keep learning this same thing over and over?
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You can serve or you can sing, and wreck your heart in prayer, working the world's hard work.
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The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.
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At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it.
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I still try to keep my eyes open. I'm always on the lookout for antlion traps in sandy soil, monarch pupae near milkweed, skipper larvae in locust leaves. These things are utterly common, and I've not seen one
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Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?
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The real and proper question is: why is it beautiful?
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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.
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Just once I wanted a task that required all the joy I had. Day after day I had noticed that if I waited long enough, my strong unexpressed joy would dwindle and dissipate inside me, like a fire subsiding . . . . Just this once I wanted to let it rip.
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When I walk with a camera, I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment's light prints on my own silver gut. When I see this second way I am above all an unscrupulous observer.
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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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The surest sign of age is loneliness.
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I break up through the skin of awareness a thousand times a day, as dolphins burst through seas, and dive again, and rise, and dive.
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