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I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again.

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
Piecemeal
World
Woke
Forgot
Discovered
Bits
Children
Years
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More quotes by Annie Dillard

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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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We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall.
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The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.
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I would like to live. . . open to time and death painlessly, noticing everything, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will.
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Geography is the key, the crucial accident of birth. A piece of protein could be a snail, a sea lion, or a systems analyst, but it had to start somewhere. This is not science it is merely metaphor. And the landscape in which the protein starts shapes its end as surely as bowls shape water.
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We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet.
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I couldn't unpeach the peaches.
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The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.
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I think the dying pray at the last not please, but thank you, as a guest thanks his host at the door.
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Writers serve as the memory of a people. They chew over our public past.
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Whenever there is stillness there is the still small voice, God's speaking from the whirlwind, nature's old song, and dance.
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Nothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves.
Annie Dillard
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I noticed this process of waking, and predicted with terrifying logic that one of these years not far away I would be awake continuously and never slip back, and never be free of myself again.
Annie Dillard
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Young children have no sense of wonder. They bewilder well, but few things surprise them. All of it is new to young children, after all, and equally gratuitous.
Annie Dillard
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Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.
Annie Dillard
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You can't test courage cautiously, so I ran hard and waved my arms hard, happy.
Annie Dillard
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I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too.
Annie Dillard
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There is neither a proportional relationship, nor an inverse one, between a writer’s estimation of a work in progress & its actual quality. The feeling that the work is magnificent, & the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged.
Annie Dillard
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For all the insularity of the old guard, Pittsburgh was always an open and democratic town.
Annie Dillard
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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.
Annie Dillard