Quote

I feel as though I stand at the foot of an infinitely high staircase, down which some exuberant spirit is flinging tennis ball after tennis ball, eternally, and the one thing I want in the world is a tennis ball.

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
Spirit
Foot
Feel
Tennis
Feels
Ball
Flinging
Thing
Balls
Exuberant
World
Feet
Staircase
Stand
Staircases
High
Eternally
Though
Infinitely

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The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring.
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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 know only enough of God to want to worship him, by any means ready to hand.
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He judged the instant and let go he flung himself loose into the stars.
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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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How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and with that one, is what we are doing.
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Fiction keeps its audience by retaining the world as its subject matter. People like the world. Many people actually prefer it to art and spend their days by choice in the thick of it.
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The mind of the writer does indeed do something before it dies, and so does its owner, but I would be hard put to call it living.
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Experiencing the present purely is being empty and hollow you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.
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I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as a dying friend. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.
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Like everyone in his right mind, I feared Santa Claus.
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I'm a housewife: I spend far more time on housework than anything else.
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A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.
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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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Painters work from the ground up. The latest version of a painting overlays earlier versions, and obliterates them. Writers, on the other hand, work from left to right. The discardable chapters are on the left.
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At a certain point, you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening.
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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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Your feelings are none of your business.
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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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