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

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The irrational haunts the metaphysical.
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No, the point is not only does time fly and do we die, but that in these reckless conditions we live at all, and are vouchsafed, for the duration of certain inexplicable moments, to know it.
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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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A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order - willed, faked, and so brought into being.
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Landscape consists in the multiple, overlapping intricacies and forms that exist in a given space at a moment in time.
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Cruelty is a mystery, and a waste of pain.
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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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You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then-and only then-it is handed to you.
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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 the dying pray at the last not please, but thank you, as a guest thanks his host at the door.
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There is neither a proportional relationship, nor an inverse one, between a writer’s estimation of a work in progress & its actual quality. The feeling that the work is magnificent, & the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged.
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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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We are here to witness. There is nothing else to do with those mute materials we do not need. Until Larry teaches his stone to talk, until God changes his mind, or until the pagan gods slip back to their hilltop groves, all we can do with the whole inhuman array is watch it.
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Nothing on earth is more gladdening than knowing we must roll up our sleeves and move back the boundaries of the humanly possible once more.
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I'm a housewife: I spend far more time on housework than anything else.
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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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It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.
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Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.
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Geography is the key, the crucial accident of birth. A piece of protein could be a snail, a sea lion, or a systems analyst, but it had to start somewhere. This is not science it is merely metaphor. And the landscape in which the protein starts shapes its end as surely as bowls shape water.
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No one escapes the wilderness on the way to the promised land.
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