Quote

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.

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
Feeling
Minerals
Moment
Sphere
Feelings
Spheres
Moments
Electric
Important
Opening
Life
Cry
Speckled
World
Touch
Hiss
Present
Mineral

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It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.
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No one escapes the wilderness on the way to the promised land.
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Cruelty is a mystery, and a waste of pain.
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The soul may ask God for anything, and never fail.
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I can't dance anymore. Total knee replacements. I can't do anything anymore.
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Unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous.
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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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A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.
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The irrational haunts the metaphysical.
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It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping God may wake someday and take offense, or the waking God may draw us out to where we can never return.
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I think the dying pray at the last not please, but thank you, as a guest thanks his host at the door.
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What I call innocence is the spirit's unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once a receptiveness and total concentration.
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The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest.
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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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It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave. It is hard to desecrate a grove and change your mind. The very holy mountains are keeping mum. We doused the burning bush and cannot rekindle it we are lighting matches in vain under every green tree.
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Push it. examine all things intensely and relentlessly.
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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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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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Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.
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Young children have no sense of wonder. They bewilder well, but few things surprise them. All of it is new to young children, after all, and equally gratuitous.
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