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Silence is not our heritage but our destiny we live where we want to live.

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
Destiny
Silence
Live
Heritage

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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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.
Annie Dillard
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Nature's silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block.
Annie Dillard
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I have since only rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam.
Annie Dillard
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It should surprise no one that the life of the writer - such as it is - is colorless to the point of sensory deprivation. Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.
Annie Dillard
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The Pulitzer is more useful than meaningful.
Annie Dillard
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Push it. examine all things intensely and relentlessly.
Annie Dillard
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The sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain. This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is.
Annie Dillard
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We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all.
Annie Dillard
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A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order - willed, faked, and so brought into being.
Annie Dillard
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The irrational haunts the metaphysical.
Annie Dillard
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Geography is the key, the crucial accident of birth. A piece of protein could be a snail, a sea lion, or a systems analyst, but it had to start somewhere. This is not science it is merely metaphor. And the landscape in which the protein starts shapes its end as surely as bowls shape water.
Annie Dillard
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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.
Annie Dillard
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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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You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then-and only then-it is handed to you.
Annie Dillard
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I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers.
Annie Dillard
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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.
Annie Dillard
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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.
Annie Dillard
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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.
Annie Dillard
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Every spring he vowed to quit teaching school, and every summer he missed his pupils and searched for them on the streets.
Annie Dillard
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The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring.
Annie Dillard