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Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.

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
Survival
Live
Thing
Every
Kind
Emergency
Extended
Emergencies
Survivor

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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Your freedom as a writer is not freedom of expression in the sense of wild blurting you may not let rip. It is life at its most free, if you are fortunate enough to be able to try it, because you select your materials, invent your task, and pace yourself.
Annie Dillard
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The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper I cannot quite make it out.
Annie Dillard
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When I teach, I preach. I thump the Bible. I exhort my students morally. I talk to them about the dedicated life.
Annie Dillard
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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.
Annie Dillard
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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.
Annie Dillard
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All my books started out as extravagant and ended up pure and plain.
Annie Dillard
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Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you.
Annie Dillard
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I'm a housewife: I spend far more time on housework than anything else.
Annie Dillard
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If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed.
Annie Dillard
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As a life's work, I would remember everything - everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net.
Annie Dillard
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Just think: in all the clean, beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a blot our planet alone has death.
Annie Dillard
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What have we been doing all these centuries but trying to call God back to the mountain, or, failing that, raise a peep out of anything that isn't us? What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are not they both saying: Hello? We spy on whales and on interstellar radio objects we starve ourselves and pray till we're blue.
Annie Dillard
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The universe that suckled us is a monster that does not care if we live or die--it does not care if it itself grinds to a halt. It is a beast running on chance and death, careening from nowhere to nowhere. It is fixed and blind, a robot programmed to kill. We are free and seeing we can only try to outwit it at every turn to save our lives.
Annie Dillard
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No, the point is not only does time fly and do we die, but that in these reckless conditions we live at all, and are vouchsafed, for the duration of certain inexplicable moments, to know it.
Annie Dillard
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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.
Annie Dillard
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The world is wider in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain and Lazarus.
Annie Dillard
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It could be that our faithlessness is a cowering cowardice born of our very smallness, a massive failure of imagination... If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldnt believe the world existed.
Annie Dillard
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The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring.
Annie Dillard
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What is a house but a bigger skin, and a neighborhood map but the world's skin ever expanding?
Annie Dillard
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I'd seen a great many partial eclipses, but a partial eclipse has the same relation to a total eclipse as flirting with a man does to marrying him. It's completely different.
Annie Dillard