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Writers serve as the memory of a people. They chew over our public past.

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
Writers
Memories
Public
Past
Writing
People
Chew
Serve
Memory

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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I had good innings, as the British say. I wrote for 38 years at the top of my form, and I wanted to quit on a high note.
Annie Dillard
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I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.
Annie Dillard
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The creatures I seek do not want to be seen.
Annie Dillard
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The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.
Annie Dillard
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The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.
Annie Dillard
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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.
Annie Dillard
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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.
Annie Dillard
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The world knew you before you knew the world.
Annie Dillard
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I would like to live. . . open to time and death painlessly, noticing everything, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will.
Annie Dillard
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We still and always want waking.
Annie Dillard
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poetry has been able to function quite directly as human interpretation of the raw, loose universe. It is a mixture, if you will, of journalism and metaphysics, or of science and religion.
Annie Dillard
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Almost all of my many passionate interests, and my many changes of mind, came through books. Books prompted the many vows I made to myself.
Annie Dillard
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The irrational haunts the metaphysical.
Annie Dillard
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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.
Annie Dillard
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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.
Annie Dillard
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We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all.
Annie Dillard
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The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring.
Annie Dillard
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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.
Annie Dillard
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I know only enough of God to want to worship him, by any means ready to hand.
Annie Dillard
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What is a house but a bigger skin, and a neighborhood map but the world's skin ever expanding?
Annie Dillard