Quote

The silence is all there is. It is the alpha and the omega, it is God's brooding over the face of the waters it is the blinded note of the ten thousand things, the whine of wings. You take a step in the right direction to pray to this silence, and even to address the prayer to World. Distinctions blur. Quit your tents. Pray without ceasing.

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
World
Face
Ten
Addresses
Alpha
Faces
Wings
Note
Distinctions
Water
Praying
Quit
Brooding
Without
Step
Quitting
Tents
Take
Thousand
Distinction
Blur
Omega
Right
Steps
Pray
Blinded
Whine
Even
Silence
Direction
Waters
Alphas
Things
Prayer
Notes
Address
Ceasing

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Adverbs are a sign that you've used the wrong verb.
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By dipping us children in the Bible so often, they hoped, I think, to give our lives a serious tint, and to provide us with quaintly magnificent snatches of prayer to produce as charms while, say, being mugged for our cash or jewels.
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You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it.
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The universe is illusion merely, not one speck of it real, and we are not only its victims, falling always into or smashed by a planet slung by the sun-but also its captives, bound by the mineral-made ropes of our senses.
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Writing a book is like rearing children -- willpower has very little to do with it. If you have a little baby crying in the middle of the night, and if you depend only on willpower to get you out of bed to feed the baby, that baby will starve. You do it out of love.
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The way to learn about a writer is to read the text. Or texts.
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The life of sensation is the life of greed it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less.
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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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For writing a first draft requires from the writer a peculiar internal state which ordinary life does not induce. ... how to set yourself spinning?
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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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If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed.
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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.
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The reader's ear must adjust down from loud life to the subtle, imaginary sounds of the written word. An ordinary reader picking up a book can't yet hear a thing it will take half an hour to pick up the writing's modulations, its ups and downs and louds and softs.
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Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don't affair. A fish flashes, then dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much salt. Deer apparently ascend bodily into heaven the brightest oriole fades into leaves.
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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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I am a fugitive and a vagabond, a sojourner seeking signs.
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The painter... does not fit the paints to the world. He most certainly does not fit the world to himself. He fits himself to the paint. The self is the servant who bears the paintbox and its inherited contents.
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There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been.
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I'm a housewife: I spend far more time on housework than anything else.
Annie Dillard