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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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I wake expectant, hoping to see a new thing.
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Put yourself out of your misery.
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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.
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if you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not.
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The irrational haunts the metaphysical.
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Who and of what import were the men whose bones bulk the Great Wall, the thirty million Mao starved, or the thirty million children not yet five who die each year now? Why, they are the insignificant others, of course living or dead, they are just some of the plentiful others...And you? To what end were we billions of oddballs born?
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I worked so hard all my life, and all I want to do now is read.
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How you spend your days is how you spend your life.
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Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you.
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There is no whit less enlightenment under the tree by your street than there was under the Buddha's bo tree. I invite you to go sit under that tree by your street.
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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.
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We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us.
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As a life's work, I would remember everything - everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net.
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Caring passionately about something isn't against nature, and it isn't against human nature. It's what we're here to do.
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Love so sprang at her, she honestly thought no one had ever looked into it. Where was it in literature? Someone would have written something. She must not have recognized it. Time to read everything again.
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Johnston's books are beautifully written and among the funniest I have ever read.
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Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.
Annie Dillard
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A shepherd on a hilltop who looks at a mess of stars and thinks, ‘There’s a hunter, a plow, a fish,’ is making mental connections that have as much real force in the universe as the very fires in those stars themselves.
Annie Dillard
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I don't know what it is about fecundity that so appalls. I suppose it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonishingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful, and that with extravagance goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives.
Annie Dillard
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I work mornings only. I go out to lunch. Afternoons I play with the baby, walk with my husband, or shovel mail.
Annie Dillard