Quote

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

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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
Present
Smooth
Fall
Explore
Two
Received
Live
Falling
Mind
Snow
Way
Wild
Unchallenged
Everywhere
Pond
Rose
Ponds

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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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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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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.
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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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I had been chipping at the world idly, and had by accident uncovered vast and labyrinthine further worlds within it.
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The creatures I seek do not want to be seen.
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if you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not.
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Just once I wanted a task that required all the joy I had. Day after day I had noticed that if I waited long enough, my strong unexpressed joy would dwindle and dissipate inside me, like a fire subsiding . . . . Just this once I wanted to let it rip.
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As a life's work, I would remember everything - everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net.
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Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.
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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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The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest.
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What have we been doing all these centuries but trying to call God back to the mountain, or, failing that, raise a peep out of anything that isn't us? What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are not they both saying: Hello? We spy on whales and on interstellar radio objects we starve ourselves and pray till we're blue.
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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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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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When I first read the words 'introvert' and 'extrovert' when I was 10, I thought I was both.
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Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?
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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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If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed.
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