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The creatures I seek do not want to be seen.

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
Seek
Creatures
Seen

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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The life of sensation is the life of greed it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less.
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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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Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.
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Geography is the key, the crucial accident of birth. A piece of protein could be a snail, a sea lion, or a systems analyst, but it had to start somewhere. This is not science it is merely metaphor. And the landscape in which the protein starts shapes its end as surely as bowls shape water.
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We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet.
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There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.
Annie Dillard
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Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
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I wake expectant, hoping to see a new thing.
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Does anything eat flowers. I couldn't recall having seen anything eat a flower - are they nature's privileged pets?
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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.
Annie Dillard
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I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.
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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.
Annie Dillard
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People who take photographs during their whole vacation won't remember their vacation. They'll only remember what photographs they took.
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The real and proper question is: why is it beautiful?
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The way to learn about a writer is to read the text. Or texts.
Annie Dillard
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Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.
Annie Dillard
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Who and of what import were the men whose bones bulk the Great Wall, the thirty million Mao starved, or the thirty million children not yet five who die each year now? Why, they are the insignificant others, of course living or dead, they are just some of the plentiful others...And you? To what end were we billions of oddballs born?
Annie Dillard
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You can't test courage cautiously, so I ran hard and waved my arms hard, happy.
Annie Dillard
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I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again.
Annie Dillard
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You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it to the page. The page is jealous and tyrannical the page is made of time and matter the page always wins.
Annie Dillard