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I saw in a blue haze all the world poured flat and pale between the mountains

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
Mountains
Mountain
Blue
Saws
Haze
World
Poured
Flat
Flats
Pale

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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We wake, if ever at all, to mystery.
Annie Dillard
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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.
Annie Dillard
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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.
Annie Dillard
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It should surprise no one that the life of the writer - such as it is - is colorless to the point of sensory deprivation. Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.
Annie Dillard
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Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a word to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and delight, the canary that sings on the skull.
Annie Dillard
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Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.
Annie Dillard
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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.
Annie Dillard
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The point of going somewhere like the Napo River in Ecuador is not to see the most spectacular anything. It is simply to see what is there.
Annie Dillard
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Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.
Annie Dillard
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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.
Annie Dillard
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Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you.
Annie Dillard
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But enough is enough. One turns at last even from glory itself with a sigh of relief. From the depths of mystery, and even from the heights of splendor, we bounce back and hurry for the latitudes of home.
Annie Dillard
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When you write, you lay out a line of words. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory.
Annie Dillard
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What have we been doing all these centuries but trying to call God back to the mountain, or, failing that, raise a peep out of anything that isn't us? What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are not they both saying: Hello? We spy on whales and on interstellar radio objects we starve ourselves and pray till we're blue.
Annie Dillard
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Landscape consists in the multiple, overlapping intricacies and forms that exist in a given space at a moment in time.
Annie Dillard
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The more you read, the more you will write. The better the stuff you read, the better the stuff you will write.
Annie Dillard
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No one can help you if you're stuck in a work. Only you can figure a way out, because only you can see the work's possibilities.
Annie Dillard
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One of the few things I know about writing is this: Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book, give it, give it all, give it now.
Annie Dillard
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Experiencing the present purely is being empty and hollow you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.
Annie Dillard
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The irrational haunts the metaphysical.
Annie Dillard