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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.
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
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Always
Formerly
Chickens
Heroic
Generation
Generations
Pure
More quotes by Annie Dillard
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.
Annie Dillard
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.
Annie Dillard
I noticed this process of waking, and predicted with terrifying logic that one of these years not far away I would be awake continuously and never slip back, and never be free of myself again.
Annie Dillard
You can't test courage cautiously, so I ran hard and waved my arms hard, happy.
Annie Dillard
It could be that our faithlessness is a cowering cowardice born of our very smallness, a massive failure of imagination... If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldnt believe the world existed.
Annie Dillard
I woke at intervals until . . . the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not.
Annie Dillard
I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again.
Annie Dillard
Experiencing the present purely is being empty and hollow you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.
Annie Dillard
Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?
Annie Dillard
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.
Annie Dillard
When you write, you lay out a line of words. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory.
Annie Dillard
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.
Annie Dillard
We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall.
Annie Dillard
The creative process obtains in all creative acts. So if I'm painting suddenly I'll see something that I didn't see before.
Annie Dillard
Geography is the key, the crucial accident of birth. A piece of protein could be a snail, a sea lion, or a systems analyst, but it had to start somewhere. This is not science it is merely metaphor. And the landscape in which the protein starts shapes its end as surely as bowls shape water.
Annie Dillard
I have since only rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam.
Annie Dillard
The Pulitzer is more useful than meaningful.
Annie Dillard
As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.
Annie Dillard
Those of us who read carried around with us like martyrs a secret knowledge, a secret joy, and a secret hope: There is a life worth living where history is still taking place there are ideas worth dying for, and circumstances where courage is still prized.
Annie Dillard
You do what you do out of your private love of the thing itself.
Annie Dillard