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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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Annie Dillard
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: April 30
Author
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Pittsburg
Pennsylvania
Annie Dillard Doak
First
Glance
Time
Knocked
Like
Glances
Seen
Seeing
Powerful
Less
Firsts
Breathless

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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Nothing on earth is more gladdening than knowing we must roll up our sleeves and move back the boundaries of the humanly possible once more.
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I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers.
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We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all.
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If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed.
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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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What have we been doing all these centuries but trying to call God back to the mountain, or, failing that, raise a peep out of anything that isn't us? What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are not they both saying: Hello? We spy on whales and on interstellar radio objects we starve ourselves and pray till we're blue.
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What I call innocence is the spirit's unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once a receptiveness and total concentration.
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It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping God may wake someday and take offense, or the waking God may draw us out to where we can never return.
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You can't test courage cautiously.
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I wake expectant, hoping to see a new thing.
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I woke at intervals until . . . the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not.
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Johnston's books are beautifully written and among the funniest I have ever read.
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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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Skin was earth it was soil. I could see, even on my own skin, the joined trapezoids of dust specks God had wetted and stuck with his spit the morning he made Adam from dirt. Now, all these generations later, we people could still see on our skin the inherited prints of the dust specks of Eden.
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The irrational haunts the metaphysical.
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At night I read and write, and things I have never understood become clear I reap the harvest of the rest of the year's planting
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The world is wider in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain and Lazarus.
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I saw in a blue haze all the world poured flat and pale between the mountains
Annie Dillard
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Push it. examine all things intensely and relentlessly.
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I alternate between thinking of the planet as home - dear and familiar stone hearth and garden - and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners.
Annie Dillard