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Cruelty is a mystery, and a waste of pain.

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
Cruelty
Waste
Mystery
Pain

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The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.
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The mind itself is an art object. It is a Mondrian canvas onto whose homemade grids it fits its own preselected products. Our knowledge is contextual and only contextual. Ordering and invention coincide: we call their collaboration knowledge.
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Landscape consists in the multiple, overlapping intricacies and forms that exist in a given space at a moment in time.
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I had been chipping at the world idly, and had by accident uncovered vast and labyrinthine further worlds within it.
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Silence is not our heritage but our destiny we live where we want to live.
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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.
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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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We are here on the planet only once, and might as well get a feel for the place.
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These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.
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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.
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I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too.
Annie Dillard
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You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then-and only then-it is handed to you.
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Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.
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By dipping us children in the Bible so often, they hoped, I think, to give our lives a serious tint, and to provide us with quaintly magnificent snatches of prayer to produce as charms while, say, being mugged for our cash or jewels.
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A schedule defends from chaos and whim. A net for catching days.
Annie Dillard
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The dear, stupid body is as easily satisfied as a spaniel.
Annie Dillard
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The interior life is often stupid.
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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You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it... The vision is not so much destroyed, exactly, as it is, by the time you have finished, forgotten. It has been replaced by this changeling.
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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