Quote

If even rock was interesting, if even this ugliness was worth whole shelves at the library, required sophisticated tools to study, and inspired grown men to crack mountains and saw crystals--then what wasn't?

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
Men
Rocks
Required
Saws
Mountains
Worth
Grown
Crystals
Wasn
Library
Ugliness
Study
Inspired
Crack
Interesting
Tools
Shelves
Whole
Mountain
Cracks
Even
Rock
Sophisticated

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We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet.
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God gave me a talent to draw. I 'owed' it to him to develop the talent.
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The way we live our days, is the way we live our lives.
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Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf
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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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The surest sign of age is loneliness.
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We are here to abet creation and to witness to it, to notice each other's beautiful face and complex nature so that creation need not play to an empty house.
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The irrational haunts the metaphysical.
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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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Whenever an encounter between a writer of good will and a regular person of good will happens to touch on the subject of writing, each person discovers, dismayed, that good will is of no earthly use. The conversation cannot proceed.
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About five years ago I saw a mockingbird make a straight vertical descent from the roof gutter of a four-story building. It was an act as careless and spontaneous as the curl of a stem or the kindling of a star.
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I break up through the skin of awareness a thousand times a day, as dolphins burst through seas, and dive again, and rise, and dive.
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The way to learn about a writer is to read the text. Or texts.
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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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Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me. This is easy to write, easy to read, and hard to believe.
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poetry has been able to function quite directly as human interpretation of the raw, loose universe. It is a mixture, if you will, of journalism and metaphysics, or of science and religion.
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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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No one escapes the wilderness on the way to the promised land.
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Your freedom as a writer is not freedom of expression in the sense of wild blurting you may not let rip. It is life at its most free, if you are fortunate enough to be able to try it, because you select your materials, invent your task, and pace yourself.
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Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you.
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