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Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.

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
Firsts
Book
Dwindles
First
Discovers
Every
Intrinsic
Impossibility
Excitement
Soon
Writer

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The way we live our days, is the way we live our lives.
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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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The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring.
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What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.
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We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us.
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The creative process obtains in all creative acts. So if I'm painting suddenly I'll see something that I didn't see before.
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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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Divinity is not playful. The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensibl e earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and fleet. There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see.
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[Insects] are not only cold-blooded, and green- and yellow-blooded, but are also cased in a clacking horn. They have rigid eyes and brains strung down their backs. But they make up the bulk of our comrades-at-life, so I look to them for a glimmer of companionship.
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You do what you do out of your private love of the thing itself.
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The way to learn about a writer is to read the text. Or texts.
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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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Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.
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The Pulitzer is more useful than meaningful.
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The dear, stupid body is as easily satisfied as a spaniel.
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There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been.
Annie Dillard
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What I call innocence is the spirit's unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once a receptiveness and total concentration.
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.
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The life of sensation is the life of greed it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less.
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Don't save something good for a later place. Don't hold back from your students, from the poor, don't try to keep anything for yourself 'cause it'll turn to ashes.
Annie Dillard