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What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.

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
Time
Borne
Like
Holiness
Spread
Surface
Lies
Color
Lying
Stuff

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As a life's work, I would remember everything - everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net.
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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.
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The mind wants the world to return its love, or its awareness the mind wants to know all the world, and all eternity, and God.
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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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Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we sense them.
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The body of literature, with its limits and edges, exists outside some people and inside others. Only after the writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature.
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There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.
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You can't test courage cautiously.
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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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Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.
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Love so sprang at her, she honestly thought no one had ever looked into it. Where was it in literature? Someone would have written something. She must not have recognized it. Time to read everything again.
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Don't save something good for a later place. Don't hold back from your students, from the poor, don't try to keep anything for yourself 'cause it'll turn to ashes.
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Are you living just a little and calling that life?
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The world knew you before you knew the world.
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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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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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Doing something does not require discipline. It creates its own discipline - with a little help from caffeine.
Annie Dillard
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Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.
Annie Dillard
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I cannot imagine a sorrier pursuit than struggling for years to write a book that attempts to appeal to people who do not read in the first place.
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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.
Annie Dillard