Quote

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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Annie Dillard
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: April 30
Author
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Pittsburg
Pennsylvania
Annie Dillard Doak
Nothing
Solemn
Done
Earnest
Made
Divinity
Ignore
Holy
Secret
Fleet
Universe
Playful
Power
Jest

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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Nature's silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block.
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I had hopes for my rough edges. I wanted to use them as a can opener, to cut myself a hole in the world's surface and exit through it.
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If I actually believed that the progress of human understanding depended on our crop of contemporary novelists, I would shoot myself.
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The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.
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I alternate between thinking of the planet as home - dear and familiar stone hearth and garden - and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners.
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You have to take pains in a memoir not to hang on the reader's arm, like a drunk, and say, 'And then I did this and it was so interesting.
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No child on earth was ever meant to be ordinary, and you can see it in them, and they know it, too, but then the times get to them, and the wear out their brains learning what folks expect, and spend their strength trying to rise over those same folks.
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It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as separating us from our creator, our very self-consciousness, is also the one thing that divides us from our fellow creatures. It was a bitter birthday present from evolution.
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It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave.
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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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The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.
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Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.
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Crystals grew inside rock like arithmetic flowers. They lengthened and spread, added plane to plane in an awed and perfect obedience to an absolute geometry that even stones - maybe only the stones - understood.
Annie Dillard
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The mind of the writer does indeed do something before it dies, and so does its owner, but I would be hard put to call it living.
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How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and with that one, is what we are doing.
Annie Dillard
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When I walk with a camera, I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment's light prints on my own silver gut. When I see this second way I am above all an unscrupulous observer.
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One of the few things I know about writing is this: Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book, give it, give it all, give it now.
Annie Dillard
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I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers.
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Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a word to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and delight, the canary that sings on the skull.
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She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.
Annie Dillard