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

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.
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What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.
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Fiction keeps its audience by retaining the world as its subject matter. People like the world. Many people actually prefer it to art and spend their days by choice in the thick of it.
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You do what you do out of your private love of the thing itself.
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Whenever there is stillness there is the still small voice, God's speaking from the whirlwind, nature's old song, and dance.
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I had been chipping at the world idly, and had by accident uncovered vast and labyrinthine further worlds within it.
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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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Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand - that of finding workable compromises between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us.
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The sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain. This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is.
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When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner's pick, a wood carver's gouge, a surgeon's probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year.
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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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if you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not.
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These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.
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The way we live our days, is the way we live our lives.
Annie Dillard
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No one escapes the wilderness on the way to the promised land.
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Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.
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The real and proper question is: why is it beautiful?
Annie Dillard
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The reader's ear must adjust down from loud life to the subtle, imaginary sounds of the written word. An ordinary reader picking up a book can't yet hear a thing it will take half an hour to pick up the writing's modulations, its ups and downs and louds and softs.
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The irrational haunts the metaphysical.
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Like any child, I slid into myself perfectly fitted, as a diver meets her reflection in a pool. Her fingertips enter the fingertips on the water, her wrists slide up her arms. The diver wraps herself in her reflection wholly, sealing it at the toes, and wears it as she climbs rising from the pool, and ever after.
Annie Dillard