Quote

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.

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
Every
Universe
Blind
Grind
Lives
Kill
Robots
Death
Turn
Monster
Careening
Running
Seeing
Nowhere
Outwit
Doe
Dies
Beast
Grinds
Care
Chance
Monsters
Programmed
Live
Turns
Fixed
Robot
Trying
Free
Save
Halt

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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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I wake expectant, hoping to see a new thing.
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I couldn't unpeach the peaches.
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The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring.
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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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The point of going somewhere like the Napo River in Ecuador is not to see the most spectacular anything. It is simply to see what is there.
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Writers serve as the memory of a people. They chew over our public past.
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Who and of what import were the men whose bones bulk the Great Wall, the thirty million Mao starved, or the thirty million children not yet five who die each year now? Why, they are the insignificant others, of course living or dead, they are just some of the plentiful others...And you? To what end were we billions of oddballs born?
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The mind itself is an art object. It is a Mondrian canvas onto whose homemade grids it fits its own preselected products. Our knowledge is contextual and only contextual. Ordering and invention coincide: we call their collaboration knowledge.
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Doing something does not require discipline. It creates its own discipline - with a little help from caffeine.
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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 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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What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
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Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.
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The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.
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A schedule defends from chaos and whim. A net for catching days.
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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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Admire the world for never ending on you -- as you would an opponent, without taking your eyes away from him, or walking away.
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Dan Gerber is one of our finest living poets.
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The universe is illusion merely, not one speck of it real, and we are not only its victims, falling always into or smashed by a planet slung by the sun-but also its captives, bound by the mineral-made ropes of our senses.
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