Quote

We are here to abet creation and to witness to it, to notice each other's beautiful face and complex nature so that creation need not play to an empty house.

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
Face
Faces
Abet
House
Notice
Nature
Complexes
Beautiful
Complex
Play
Witness
Need
Empty
Needs
Creation

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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How can people think that artists seek a name? A name, like a face, is something you have when you're not alone. There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world, lit or unlit as the light allows.
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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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The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.
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How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and with that one, is what we are doing.
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Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?
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Just once I wanted a task that required all the joy I had. Day after day I had noticed that if I waited long enough, my strong unexpressed joy would dwindle and dissipate inside me, like a fire subsiding . . . . Just this once I wanted to let it rip.
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It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave.
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Time is the warp and matter the weft of the woven texture of beauty in space, and death is the hurling shuttle.
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The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper I cannot quite make it out.
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Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.
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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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Doing something does not require discipline. It creates its own discipline - with a little help from caffeine.
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Push it. examine all things intensely and relentlessly.
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Then why did you tell me?
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If even rock was interesting, if even this ugliness was worth whole shelves at the library, required sophisticated tools to study, and inspired grown men to crack mountains and saw crystals--then what wasn't?
Annie Dillard
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The soul may ask God for anything, and never fail.
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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Theirs is the mystery of continuous creation and all that providence implies: the uncertainty of vision, the horror of the fixed, the dissolution of the present, the intricacy of beauty, the pressure of fecundity, the elusiveness of the free, and the flawed nature of perfection.
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Books swept me away, this way and that, one after the other I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them.
Annie Dillard
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A schedule defends from chaos and whim. A net for catching days.
Annie Dillard