Quote

You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it to the page. The page is jealous and tyrannical the page is made of time and matter the page always wins.

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
Take
Wins
Made
Jealous
Way
Page
Always
Pages
Time
Vision
Think
Winning
Thinking
Wrong
Tyrannical
Matter
Tame

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Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don't affair. A fish flashes, then dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much salt. Deer apparently ascend bodily into heaven the brightest oriole fades into leaves.
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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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Skin was earth it was soil. I could see, even on my own skin, the joined trapezoids of dust specks God had wetted and stuck with his spit the morning he made Adam from dirt. Now, all these generations later, we people could still see on our skin the inherited prints of the dust specks of Eden.
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The real and proper question is: why is it beautiful?
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No child on earth was ever meant to be ordinary, and you can see it in them, and they know it, too, but then the times get to them, and the wear out their brains learning what folks expect, and spend their strength trying to rise over those same folks.
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Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we sense them.
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We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us.
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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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Time is the continuous loop, the snakeskin with scales endlessly overlapping without beginning or end, or time is an ascending spiral if you will, like a child's toy Slinky.
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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 universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest.
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She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.
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Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
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People who take photographs during their whole vacation won't remember their vacation. They'll only remember what photographs they took.
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You can't test courage cautiously.
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Cruelty is a mystery, and a waste of pain.
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Novels written with film contracts in mind have a faint but unmistakable, and ruinous, odor.
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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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I'm a housewife: I spend far more time on housework than anything else.
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I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.
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