Quote

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.

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
Simply
Point
Anything
Going
Ecuador
Like
Spectacular
River
Rivers
Somewhere

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One of the few things I know about writing is this: Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book, give it, give it all, give it now.
Annie Dillard
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Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.
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It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as separating us from our creator, our very self-consciousness, is also the one thing that divides us from our fellow creatures. It was a bitter birthday present from evolution.
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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.
Annie Dillard
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[Insects] are not only cold-blooded, and green- and yellow-blooded, but are also cased in a clacking horn. They have rigid eyes and brains strung down their backs. But they make up the bulk of our comrades-at-life, so I look to them for a glimmer of companionship.
Annie Dillard
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I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as a dying friend. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.
Annie Dillard
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Write about winter in the summer.
Annie Dillard
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Geography is the key, the crucial accident of birth. A piece of protein could be a snail, a sea lion, or a systems analyst, but it had to start somewhere. This is not science it is merely metaphor. And the landscape in which the protein starts shapes its end as surely as bowls shape water.
Annie Dillard
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In literary history, generation follows generation in a rage.
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Old memories are very easy to get except that once you write about something you've destroyed it.
Annie Dillard
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It could be that our faithlessness is a cowering cowardice born of our very smallness, a massive failure of imagination... If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldnt believe the world existed.
Annie Dillard
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Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.
Annie Dillard
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Nothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves.
Annie Dillard
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Does anything eat flowers. I couldn't recall having seen anything eat a flower - are they nature's privileged pets?
Annie Dillard
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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.
Annie Dillard
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The dear, stupid body is as easily satisfied as a spaniel.
Annie Dillard
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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.
Annie Dillard
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The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.
Annie Dillard
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The silence is all there is. It is the alpha and the omega, it is God's brooding over the face of the waters it is the blinded note of the ten thousand things, the whine of wings. You take a step in the right direction to pray to this silence, and even to address the prayer to World. Distinctions blur. Quit your tents. Pray without ceasing.
Annie Dillard
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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.
Annie Dillard