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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.

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
Merciful
Feet
Men
Flicks
Beetle
Beetles
Encountered

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I would like to live. . . open to time and death painlessly, noticing everything, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will.
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The Pulitzer is more useful than meaningful.
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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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The universe that suckled us is a monster that does not care if we live or die--it does not care if it itself grinds to a halt. It is a beast running on chance and death, careening from nowhere to nowhere. It is fixed and blind, a robot programmed to kill. We are free and seeing we can only try to outwit it at every turn to save our lives.
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The mind wants the world to return its love, or its awareness the mind wants to know all the world, and all eternity, and God.
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I'd seen a great many partial eclipses, but a partial eclipse has the same relation to a total eclipse as flirting with a man does to marrying him. It's completely different.
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Whenever an encounter between a writer of good will and a regular person of good will happens to touch on the subject of writing, each person discovers, dismayed, that good will is of no earthly use. The conversation cannot proceed.
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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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The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.
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We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us.
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Dan Gerber is one of our finest living poets.
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For writing a first draft requires from the writer a peculiar internal state which ordinary life does not induce. ... how to set yourself spinning?
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Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.
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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.
Annie Dillard
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Nature seems to exult in abounding radicality, extremism, anarchy. If we were to judge nature by its common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed. In nature, improbabilities are the one stock in trade. The whole creation is one lunatic fringe. ... No claims of any and all revelations could be so far-fetched as a single giraffe.
Annie Dillard
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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.
Annie Dillard
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Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.
Annie Dillard
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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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I have since only rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam.
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Could two live that way? Could two live under the wild rose, and explore by the pond, so that the smooth mind of each is as everywhere present to the other, and as received and as unchallenged, as falling snow?
Annie Dillard