Quote

Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand - that of finding workable compromises between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us.

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
Business
Compromises
Facts
Absurdity
Hands
Wherever
Seems
Compromise
Ideas
Findings
Finding
Hand
Workable
Fact
Sublimity

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Time is the warp and matter the weft of the woven texture of beauty in space, and death is the hurling shuttle.
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The way we live our days, is the way we live our lives.
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People who read are not too lazy to turn on the television they prefer books.
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Fiction keeps its audience by retaining the world as its subject matter. People like the world. Many people actually prefer it to art and spend their days by choice in the thick of it.
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The mind itself is an art object ... The mind is a blue guitar on which we improvise the song of the world.
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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.
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I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers.
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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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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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When you write, you lay out a line of words. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory.
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Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.
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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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We wake, if ever at all, to mystery.
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Painters work from the ground up. The latest version of a painting overlays earlier versions, and obliterates them. Writers, on the other hand, work from left to right. The discardable chapters are on the left.
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There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world lit or unlit as the light allows. When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it?
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Don't save something good for a later place. Don't hold back from your students, from the poor, don't try to keep anything for yourself 'cause it'll turn to ashes.
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Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.
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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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It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave.
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Push it. examine all things intensely and relentlessly.
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