Quote

We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall.

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
Never
Waking
Life
Useless
Private
Insensible
Sleep
Recall
Half
Recalls
Water
Mention
Lives
Waters
Live
Sleeping

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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How can people think that artists seek a name? A name, like a face, is something you have when you're not alone. There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world, lit or unlit as the light allows.
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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.
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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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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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Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?
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Could two live that way? Could two live under the wild rose, and explore by the pond, so that the smooth mind of each is as everywhere present to the other, and as received and as unchallenged, as falling snow?
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We still and always want waking.
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No one can help you if you're stuck in a work. Only you can figure a way out, because only you can see the work's possibilities.
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She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.
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The way to learn about a writer is to read the text. Or texts.
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I cannot imagine a sorrier pursuit than struggling for years to write a book that attempts to appeal to people who do not read in the first place.
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It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as separating us from our creator, our very self-consciousness, is also the one thing that divides us from our fellow creatures. It was a bitter birthday present from evolution.
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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
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Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.
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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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What is a house but a bigger skin, and a neighborhood map but the world's skin ever expanding?
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Johnston's books are beautifully written and among the funniest I have ever read.
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In literary history, generation follows generation in a rage.
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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.
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You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it... The vision is not so much destroyed, exactly, as it is, by the time you have finished, forgotten. It has been replaced by this changeling.
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