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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.

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
Scattered
Culture
Possesses
Form
Throughout
Body
According
Persons
Souls
Soul
Six
Person
Tiny
Inuit
Take
Greenland
People
Seven

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You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then-and only then-it is handed to you.
Annie Dillard
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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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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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I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.
Annie Dillard
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The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.
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Silence is not our heritage but our destiny we live where we want to live.
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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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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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Our life seems cursed to be a wiggle merely, and a wandering without end.
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Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.
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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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The novel is a game or joke shared between author and reader.
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Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.
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What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
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What have we been doing all these centuries but trying to call God back to the mountain, or, failing that, raise a peep out of anything that isn't us? What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are not they both saying: Hello? We spy on whales and on interstellar radio objects we starve ourselves and pray till we're blue.
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No, the point is not only does time fly and do we die, but that in these reckless conditions we live at all, and are vouchsafed, for the duration of certain inexplicable moments, to know it.
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You can't test courage cautiously, so I ran hard and waved my arms hard, happy.
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I woke at intervals until . . . the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not.
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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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I don't know what it is about fecundity that so appalls. I suppose it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonishingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful, and that with extravagance goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives.
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