Quote

I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.

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
Eyes
Eye
Tinder
Water
Flint
Look
Sparks
Come
Flames
Looks
Everywhere
Whole
Cool
World
Fire

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Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we sense them.
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What is important is the moment of opening a life and feeling it touch--with an electric hiss and cry--this speckled mineral sphere, our present world.
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Writers serve as the memory of a people. They chew over our public past.
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For all the insularity of the old guard, Pittsburgh was always an open and democratic town.
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On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away.
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You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it to the page. The page is jealous and tyrannical the page is made of time and matter the page always wins.
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Nature's silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block.
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The dear, stupid body is as easily satisfied as a spaniel.
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I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you.
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The novel is a game or joke shared between author and reader.
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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 my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.
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I woke at intervals until . . . the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not.
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Cruelty is a mystery, and a waste of pain.
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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.
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