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

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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.
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It makes more sense to write one big book - a novel or nonfiction narrative - than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all you possess and learn.
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We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall.
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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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We live in all we seek. The hidden shows up in too-plain sight. It lives captive on the face of the obvious - the people, events, and things of the day - to which we as sophisticated children have long since become oblivious. What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.
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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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He judged the instant and let go he flung himself loose into the stars.
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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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Even if things are as bad as they could possible be, and as meaningless, then matters of truth are themselves indifferent we may as well please our sensibilities and, with as much spirit as we can muster, go out with a buck and a wing.
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Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you.
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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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We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all.
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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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The life of sensation is the life of greed it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less.
Annie Dillard
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poetry has been able to function quite directly as human interpretation of the raw, loose universe. It is a mixture, if you will, of journalism and metaphysics, or of science and religion.
Annie Dillard
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We live in all we seek.
Annie Dillard
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Write as if you are dying.
Annie Dillard
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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.
Annie Dillard
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She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.
Annie Dillard
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if you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not.
Annie Dillard