Quote

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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Annie Dillard
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: April 30
Author
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Pittsburg
Pennsylvania
Annie Dillard Doak
Away
Terrifying
Back
Slips
Years
Noticed
Never
Waking
Would
Awake
Logic
Predicted
Free
Continuously
Process
Slip

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It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.
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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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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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The body of literature, with its limits and edges, exists outside some people and inside others. Only after the writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature.
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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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Could two live that way? Could two live under the wild rose, and explore by the pond, so that the smooth mind of each is as everywhere present to the other, and as received and as unchallenged, as falling snow?
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There must be bands of enthusiasts for everything on earth-fanatics who shared a vocabulary, a batch of technical skills and equipment, and, perhaps, a vision of some single slice of the beauty and mystery of things, of their complexity, fascination, and unexpectedness.
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Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me. This is easy to write, easy to read, and hard to believe.
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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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When I first read the words 'introvert' and 'extrovert' when I was 10, I thought I was both.
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What is a house but a bigger skin, and a neighborhood map but the world's skin ever expanding?
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Admire the world for never ending on you -- as you would an opponent, without taking your eyes away from him, or walking away.
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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.
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Adverbs are a sign that you've used the wrong verb.
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Write as if you are dying.
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At night I read and write, and things I have never understood become clear I reap the harvest of the rest of the year's planting
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I have since only rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam.
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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.
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I had hopes for my rough edges. I wanted to use them as a can opener, to cut myself a hole in the world's surface and exit through it.
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