Quote

Trees have a curious relationship to the subject of the present moment. There are many created things in the universe that outlive us, that outlive the sun, even, but I can't think about them. I live with trees.

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
Live
Created
Subjects
Many
Relationship
Even
Tree
Outlive
Things
Present
Trees
Think
Moment
Curious
Thinking
Universe
Subject
Moments
Sun

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I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.
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The way you live your days is the way you live your life.
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Nature seems to exult in abounding radicality, extremism, anarchy. If we were to judge nature by its common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed. In nature, improbabilities are the one stock in trade. The whole creation is one lunatic fringe. ... No claims of any and all revelations could be so far-fetched as a single giraffe.
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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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Adverbs are a sign that you've used the wrong verb.
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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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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.
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It's a little silly to finally learn how to write at this age. But I long ago realized I was secretly sincere.
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The creatures I seek do not want to be seen.
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God gave me a talent to draw. I 'owed' it to him to develop the talent.
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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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The point of going somewhere like the Napo River in Ecuador is not to see the most spectacular anything. It is simply to see what is there.
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Nothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves.
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Are you living just a little and calling that life?
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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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You can't test courage cautiously, so I ran hard and waved my arms hard, happy.
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What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
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Dan Gerber is one of our finest living poets.
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The painter... does not fit the paints to the world. He most certainly does not fit the world to himself. He fits himself to the paint. The self is the servant who bears the paintbox and its inherited contents.
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Ecstasy, I think, is a soul's response to the waves holiness makes as it nears.
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