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Unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous.

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
Race
Deluded
Age
Races
Seems
Wholly
Thing
Ages
Men
Mass
Unless
Grace
Beauty
Gratuitous

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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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Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.
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The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.
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Last forever!' Who hasn't prayed that prayer? You were lucky to get it in the first place. The present is a freely given canvas. That it is constantly being ripped apart and washed downstream goes without saying.
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Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me. This is easy to write, easy to read, and hard to believe.
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The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper I cannot quite make it out.
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Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we sense them.
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I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you.
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About five years ago I saw a mockingbird make a straight vertical descent from the roof gutter of a four-story building. It was an act as careless and spontaneous as the curl of a stem or the kindling of a star.
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The dear, stupid body is as easily satisfied as a spaniel.
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It makes more sense to write one big book - a novel or nonfiction narrative - than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all you possess and learn.
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Cruelty is a mystery, and a waste of pain.
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The courage of children and beasts is a function of innocence.
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If you're going to publish a book, you probably are going to make a fool of yourself.
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If we listened to our intellect, we’d never have a love affair... or go into business. You’ve got to jump off cliffs and build your wings on the way down.
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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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I never met a man who was shaken by a field of identical blades of grass. An acre of poppies and a forest of spruce boggle no one's mind.
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An Eskimo shaman said, Life's greatest danger lies in the fact that man's food consists entirely of souls.
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Writing a book is like rearing children -- willpower has very little to do with it. If you have a little baby crying in the middle of the night, and if you depend only on willpower to get you out of bed to feed the baby, that baby will starve. You do it out of love.
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I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.
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