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What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?

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
Would
Enrage
Triviality
Dying
Persons
Person

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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.
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We are here to witness the creation and to abet it.
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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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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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Our family was on the lunatic fringe. My mother was always completely irrepressible. My father made crowd noises into a microphone.
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The dear, stupid body is as easily satisfied as a spaniel.
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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.
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The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring.
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I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you.
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A shepherd on a hilltop who looks at a mess of stars and thinks, ‘There’s a hunter, a plow, a fish,’ is making mental connections that have as much real force in the universe as the very fires in those stars themselves.
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I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.
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There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.
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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.
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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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How you spend your days is how you spend your life.
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Novels written with film contracts in mind have a faint but unmistakable, and ruinous, odor.
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There is no whit less enlightenment under the tree by your street than there was under the Buddha's bo tree. I invite you to go sit under that tree by your street.
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If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed.
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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.
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She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.
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