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

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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Experiencing the present purely is being empty and hollow you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.
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For writing a first draft requires from the writer a peculiar internal state which ordinary life does not induce. ... how to set yourself spinning?
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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 know only enough of God to want to worship him, by any means ready to hand.
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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.
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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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What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
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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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The way we live our days, is the way we live our lives.
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Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you.
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The creative process obtains in all creative acts. So if I'm painting suddenly I'll see something that I didn't see before.
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The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.
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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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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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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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We wake, if ever at all, to mystery.
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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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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.
Annie Dillard
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The novel is a game or joke shared between author and reader.
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The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest.
Annie Dillard