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Experiencing the present purely is being empty and hollow you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.

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
Men
Purely
Time
Emptiness
Life
Cups
Catch
Waterfall
Empty
Waterfalls
Grace
Fills
Present
Experiencing
Inspirational
Hollow

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We are here on the planet only once, and might as well get a feel for the place.
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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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What is a house but a bigger skin, and a neighborhood map but the world's skin ever expanding?
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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.
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if you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not.
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As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.
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It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.
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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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poetry has been able to function quite directly as human interpretation of the raw, loose universe. It is a mixture, if you will, of journalism and metaphysics, or of science and religion.
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No one can help you if you're stuck in a work. Only you can figure a way out, because only you can see the work's possibilities.
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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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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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I couldn't unpeach the peaches.
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We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet.
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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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Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand - that of finding workable compromises between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us.
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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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The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.
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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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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