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

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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An Inuit hunter asked the local missionary priest: If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell? No, said the priest, not if you did not know. Then why, asked the Inuit earnestly, did you tell me?
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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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It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.
Annie Dillard
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The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.
Annie Dillard
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These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.
Annie Dillard
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Last forever!' Who hasn't prayed that prayer? You were lucky to get it in the first place. The present is a freely given canvas. That it is constantly being ripped apart and washed downstream goes without saying.
Annie Dillard
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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.
Annie Dillard
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I write in my own journal when something extraordinary or funny happens. And there's some nice imagery in there. I don't think of what to do with it.
Annie Dillard
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If I actually believed that the progress of human understanding depended on our crop of contemporary novelists, I would shoot myself.
Annie Dillard
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A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.
Annie Dillard
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I wake expectant, hoping to see a new thing.
Annie Dillard
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The way to learn about a writer is to read the text. Or texts.
Annie Dillard
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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.
Annie Dillard
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Push it. examine all things intensely and relentlessly.
Annie Dillard
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We still and always want waking.
Annie Dillard
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I break up through the skin of awareness a thousand times a day, as dolphins burst through seas, and dive again, and rise, and dive.
Annie Dillard
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I had good innings, as the British say. I wrote for 38 years at the top of my form, and I wanted to quit on a high note.
Annie Dillard
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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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The irrational haunts the metaphysical.
Annie Dillard
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I think that the dying pray at the last not please but thank you, as a guest thanks his host at the door. Falling from airplanes the people are crying thank you, thank you, all down the air and the cold carriages draw up for them on the rocks.
Annie Dillard