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
Years
Noticed
Never
Waking
Would
Awake
Logic
Predicted
Free
Continuously
Process
Slip
Away
Terrifying
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We wake, if ever at all, to mystery.
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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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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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Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.
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He judged the instant and let go he flung himself loose into the stars.
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Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.
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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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No one escapes the wilderness on the way to the promised land.
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I think that the dying pray at the last not please but thank you, as a guest thanks his host at the door. Falling from airplanes the people are crying thank you, thank you, all down the air and the cold carriages draw up for them on the rocks.
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It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as separating us from our creator, our very self-consciousness, is also the one thing that divides us from our fellow creatures. It was a bitter birthday present from evolution.
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Having chosen this foolishness, I was a free being. How could the world ever stop me, how could I betray myself, if I was not afraid?
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Doing something does not require discipline. It creates its own discipline - with a little help from caffeine.
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Landscape consists in the multiple, overlapping intricacies and forms that exist in a given space at a moment in time.
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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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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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Last forever!' Who hasn't prayed that prayer? You were lucky to get it in the first place. The present is a freely given canvas. That it is constantly being ripped apart and washed downstream goes without saying.
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You can't test courage cautiously, so I ran hard and waved my arms hard, happy.
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Trees have a curious relationship to the subject of the present moment. There are many created things in the universe that outlive us, that outlive the sun, even, but I can't think about them. I live with trees.
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I saw in a blue haze all the world poured flat and pale between the mountains
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I had been chipping at the world idly, and had by accident uncovered vast and labyrinthine further worlds within it.
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