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Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation's short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit.

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
Knowing
Watching
Fall
Air
Feelings
Short
Away
Generations
Drop
Every
Side
Falling
Time
Sides
Rivers
Alive
Fast
Feeling
Generation

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I had been chipping at the world idly, and had by accident uncovered vast and labyrinthine further worlds within it.
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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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There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.
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I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again.
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The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest.
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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.
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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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I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you.
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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.
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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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What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
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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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There is neither a proportional relationship, nor an inverse one, between a writer’s estimation of a work in progress & its actual quality. The feeling that the work is magnificent, & the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged.
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You can't test courage cautiously, so I ran hard and waved my arms hard, happy.
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I saw in a blue haze all the world poured flat and pale between the mountains
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I know only enough of God to want to worship him, by any means ready to hand.
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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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