Quote

I am sorry I ran from you. I am still running, running from that knowledge, that eye, that love from which there is no refuge. For you meant only love, and love, and I felt only fear, and pain. So once in Israel love came to us incarnate, stood in the doorway between two worlds, and we were all afraid.

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
Running
Meant
Doorway
Two
Afraid
Doorways
Stills
Came
Refuge
Still
Knowledge
Ran
Love
Eye
Stood
World
Pain
Worlds
Fear
Israel
Felt
Sorry
Incarnate

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People who take photographs during their whole vacation won't remember their vacation. They'll only remember what photographs they took.
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Skin was earth it was soil. I could see, even on my own skin, the joined trapezoids of dust specks God had wetted and stuck with his spit the morning he made Adam from dirt. Now, all these generations later, we people could still see on our skin the inherited prints of the dust specks of Eden.
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Whenever there is stillness there is the still small voice, God's speaking from the whirlwind, nature's old song, and dance.
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Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
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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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Like everyone in his right mind, I feared Santa Claus.
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At a certain point, you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening.
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Put yourself out of your misery.
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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.
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I saw in a blue haze all the world poured flat and pale between the mountains
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We are here to witness the creation and to abet it.
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We live in all we seek.
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Adverbs are a sign that you've used the wrong verb.
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I worked so hard all my life, and all I want to do now is read.
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When I teach, I preach. I thump the Bible. I exhort my students morally. I talk to them about the dedicated life.
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When I walk with a camera, I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment's light prints on my own silver gut. When I see this second way I am above all an unscrupulous observer.
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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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For all the insularity of the old guard, Pittsburgh was always an open and democratic town.
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Self-consciousness is the curse of the city and all that sophistication implies.
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