Quote

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.

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
Last
Inspiring
Washed
Given
Lucky
Prayed
Place
Goes
Ripped
Firsts
Present
Freely
Without
Saying
Canvas
First
Prayer
Hasn
Forever
Apart
Lasts
Constantly
Downstream

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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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.
Annie Dillard
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Write as if you are dying.
Annie Dillard
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What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
Annie Dillard
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Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a word to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and delight, the canary that sings on the skull.
Annie Dillard
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[Insects] are not only cold-blooded, and green- and yellow-blooded, but are also cased in a clacking horn. They have rigid eyes and brains strung down their backs. But they make up the bulk of our comrades-at-life, so I look to them for a glimmer of companionship.
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
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What is important is the moment of opening a life and feeling it touch--with an electric hiss and cry--this speckled mineral sphere, our present world.
Annie Dillard
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Divinity is not playful. The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensibl e earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and fleet. There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see.
Annie Dillard
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If I actually believed that the progress of human understanding depended on our crop of contemporary novelists, I would shoot myself.
Annie Dillard
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The sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain. This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is.
Annie Dillard
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You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you hear it: There is nothing there...You feel the world's word as a tension, a hum, a single chorused note everywhere the same. This is it: This hum is the silence.
Annie Dillard
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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.
Annie Dillard
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It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.
Annie Dillard
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We are here to abet creation and to witness to it, to notice each other's beautiful face and complex nature so that creation need not play to an empty house.
Annie Dillard
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How can people think that artists seek a name? A name, like a face, is something you have when you're not alone. There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world, lit or unlit as the light allows.
Annie Dillard
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The courage of children and beasts is a function of innocence.
Annie Dillard
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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.
Annie Dillard
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The Pulitzer is more useful than meaningful.
Annie Dillard
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What is a house but a bigger skin, and a neighborhood map but the world's skin ever expanding?
Annie Dillard
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I write in my own journal when something extraordinary or funny happens. And there's some nice imagery in there. I don't think of what to do with it.
Annie Dillard