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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
Real
Hoot
Chimneys
Proper
Question
Beautiful

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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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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According to Inuit culture in Greenland, a person possesses six or seven souls. The souls take the form of tiny people scattered throughout the body.
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Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation's short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit.
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You do what you do out of your private love of the thing itself.
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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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A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.
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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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It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave.
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We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall.
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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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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 search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then-and only then-it is handed to you.
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You can't test courage cautiously.
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The mind itself is an art object. It is a Mondrian canvas onto whose homemade grids it fits its own preselected products. Our knowledge is contextual and only contextual. Ordering and invention coincide: we call their collaboration knowledge.
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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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A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order - willed, faked, and so brought into being.
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All my books started out as extravagant and ended up pure and plain.
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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.
Annie Dillard
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There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.
Annie Dillard
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What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.
Annie Dillard