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The real and proper question is: why is it beautiful?

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
Hoot
Chimneys
Proper
Question
Beautiful
Real

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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I'm a housewife: I spend far more time on housework than anything else.
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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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You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it... The vision is not so much destroyed, exactly, as it is, by the time you have finished, forgotten. It has been replaced by this changeling.
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Just think: in all the clean, beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a blot our planet alone has death.
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An Inuit hunter asked the local missionary priest: If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell? No, said the priest, not if you did not know. Then why, asked the Inuit earnestly, did you tell me?
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The novel is a game or joke shared between author and reader.
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Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we sense them.
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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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The surest sign of age is loneliness.
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We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence.
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No one can help you if you're stuck in a work. Only you can figure a way out, because only you can see the work's possibilities.
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No one escapes the wilderness on the way to the promised land.
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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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For all the insularity of the old guard, Pittsburgh was always an open and democratic town.
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Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.
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The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.
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Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.
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God gave me a talent to draw. I 'owed' it to him to develop the talent.
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Dan Gerber is one of our finest living poets.
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The dear, stupid body is as easily satisfied as a spaniel.
Annie Dillard