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It could be that our faithlessness is a cowering cowardice born of our very smallness, a massive failure of imagination... If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldnt believe the world existed.

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
Common
Likelihood
Born
Cowardice
Sense
Existed
Nature
Massive
Believe
Judge
World
Judging
Faithlessness
Failure
Cowering
Imagination
Smallness

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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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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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There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.
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Write about winter in the summer. Describe Norway as Ibsen did, from a desk in Italy describe Dublin as James Joyce did, from a desk in Paris. Willa Cather wrote her prairie novels in New York City Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn in Hartford, Connecticut. Recently, scholars learned that Walt Whitman rarely left his room.
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There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world lit or unlit as the light allows. When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it?
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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.
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A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.
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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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We wake, if ever at all, to mystery.
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People who take photographs during their whole vacation won't remember their vacation. They'll only remember what photographs they took.
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When I first read the words 'introvert' and 'extrovert' when I was 10, I thought I was both.
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You can't test courage cautiously, so I ran hard and waved my arms hard, happy.
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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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Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don't affair. A fish flashes, then dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much salt. Deer apparently ascend bodily into heaven the brightest oriole fades into leaves.
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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.
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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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The creatures I seek do not want to be seen.
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Whenever an encounter between a writer of good will and a regular person of good will happens to touch on the subject of writing, each person discovers, dismayed, that good will is of no earthly use. The conversation cannot proceed.
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Just think: in all the clean, beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a blot our planet alone has death.
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You do what you do out of your private love of the thing itself.
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