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
Ignore
Holy
Fleet
Secret
Playful
Universe
Jest
Power
Solemn
Nothing
Earnest
Done
Made
Divinity

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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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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Who and of what import were the men whose bones bulk the Great Wall, the thirty million Mao starved, or the thirty million children not yet five who die each year now? Why, they are the insignificant others, of course living or dead, they are just some of the plentiful others...And you? To what end were we billions of oddballs born?
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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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We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence.
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if you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not.
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Doing something does not require discipline. It creates its own discipline - with a little help from caffeine.
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I know only enough of God to want to worship him, by any means ready to hand.
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Every spring he vowed to quit teaching school, and every summer he missed his pupils and searched for them on the streets.
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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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I noticed this process of waking, and predicted with terrifying logic that one of these years not far away I would be awake continuously and never slip back, and never be free of myself again.
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All my books started out as extravagant and ended up pure and plain.
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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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We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all.
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For all the insularity of the old guard, Pittsburgh was always an open and democratic town.
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Time is the continuous loop, the snakeskin with scales endlessly overlapping without beginning or end, or time is an ascending spiral if you will, like a child's toy Slinky.
Annie Dillard
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Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?
Annie Dillard
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Writers serve as the memory of a people. They chew over our public past.
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Painters work from the ground up. The latest version of a painting overlays earlier versions, and obliterates them. Writers, on the other hand, work from left to right. The discardable chapters are on the left.
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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?
Annie Dillard
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The mind itself is an art object ... The mind is a blue guitar on which we improvise the song of the world.
Annie Dillard