Quote

You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it.

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
Dark
Neither
Find
Perspective
Look
Demand
Looks
However
Necessary
Outside
Darkness
Stars
Require

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We are here to witness the creation and to abet it.
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The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.
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The way you live your days is the way you live your life.
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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.
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I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers.
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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.
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Then why did you tell me?
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Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.
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The way we live our days, is the way we live our lives.
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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.
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You do what you do out of your private love of the thing itself.
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It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale.
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There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by.
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Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.
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What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.
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Every spring he vowed to quit teaching school, and every summer he missed his pupils and searched for them on the streets.
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Almost all of my many passionate interests, and my many changes of mind, came through books. Books prompted the many vows I made to myself.
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Like everyone in his right mind, I feared Santa Claus.
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When I walk with a camera, I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment's light prints on my own silver gut. When I see this second way I am above all an unscrupulous observer.
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At a certain point, you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening.
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