Quote

I still try to keep my eyes open. I'm always on the lookout for antlion traps in sandy soil, monarch pupae near milkweed, skipper larvae in locust leaves. These things are utterly common, and I've not seen one

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
Always
Open
Sandy
Things
Eyes
Monarchs
Common
Traps
Eye
Utterly
Milkweed
Keep
Soil
Locust
Stills
Near
Skipper
Still
Leaves
Lookout
Trying
Seen
Monarch

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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.
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Caring passionately about something isn't against nature, and it isn't against human nature. It's what we're here to do.
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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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We are here to witness. There is nothing else to do with those mute materials we do not need. Until Larry teaches his stone to talk, until God changes his mind, or until the pagan gods slip back to their hilltop groves, all we can do with the whole inhuman array is watch it.
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Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf
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Every day is a god, each day is a god, and holiness holds forth in time.
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We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us.
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Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?
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Write about winter in the summer.
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Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you.
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Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.
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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.
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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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When I first read the words 'introvert' and 'extrovert' when I was 10, I thought I was both.
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Admire the world for never ending on you -- as you would an opponent, without taking your eyes away from him, or walking away.
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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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By dipping us children in the Bible so often, they hoped, I think, to give our lives a serious tint, and to provide us with quaintly magnificent snatches of prayer to produce as charms while, say, being mugged for our cash or jewels.
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We are here to abet creation and to witness to it, to notice each other's beautiful face and complex nature so that creation need not play to an empty house.
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How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and with that one, is what we are doing.
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Private life, book life, took place where words met imagination without passing through the world.
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