Quote

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

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At night I read and write, and things I have never understood become clear I reap the harvest of the rest of the year's planting
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The reader's ear must adjust down from loud life to the subtle, imaginary sounds of the written word. An ordinary reader picking up a book can't yet hear a thing it will take half an hour to pick up the writing's modulations, its ups and downs and louds and softs.
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A schedule defends from chaos and whim. A net for catching days.
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Cruelty is a mystery, and a waste of pain.
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There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been.
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The novel is a game or joke shared between author and reader.
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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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Let the grass die. I let almost all of my indoor plants die from neglect while I was writing the book. There are all kinds of ways to live. You can take your choice. You can keep a tidy house, and when St. Peter asks you what you did with your life, you can say, I kept a tidy house, I made my own cheese balls.
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I write in my own journal when something extraordinary or funny happens. And there's some nice imagery in there. I don't think of what to do with it.
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I noticed this process of waking, and predicted with terrifying logic that one of these years not far away I would be awake continuously and never slip back, and never be free of myself again.
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Novels written with film contracts in mind have a faint but unmistakable, and ruinous, odor.
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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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A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order - willed, faked, and so brought into being.
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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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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.
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What is a house but a bigger skin, and a neighborhood map but the world's skin ever expanding?
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Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.
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I couldn't unpeach the peaches.
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Just think: in all the clean, beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a blot our planet alone has death.
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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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