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You can't test courage cautiously, so I ran hard and waved my arms hard, happy.

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
Hard
Cautiously
Waved
Ran
Test
Tests
Arms
Courage
Happy

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Unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous.
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I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers.
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Just once I wanted a task that required all the joy I had. Day after day I had noticed that if I waited long enough, my strong unexpressed joy would dwindle and dissipate inside me, like a fire subsiding . . . . Just this once I wanted to let it rip.
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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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Let the grass die. I let almost all of my indoor plants die from neglect while I was writing the book. There are all kinds of ways to live. You can take your choice. You can keep a tidy house, and when St. Peter asks you what you did with your life, you can say, I kept a tidy house, I made my own cheese balls.
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The surest sign of age is loneliness.
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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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Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.
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Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?
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The sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain. This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is.
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I couldn't unpeach the peaches.
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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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People who read are not too lazy to turn on the television they prefer books.
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The way to learn about a writer is to read the text. Or texts.
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The interior life is often stupid.
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There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world lit or unlit as the light allows. When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it?
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Like any child, I slid into myself perfectly fitted, as a diver meets her reflection in a pool. Her fingertips enter the fingertips on the water, her wrists slide up her arms. The diver wraps herself in her reflection wholly, sealing it at the toes, and wears it as she climbs rising from the pool, and ever after.
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As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.
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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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All my books started out as extravagant and ended up pure and plain.
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