Quote

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.

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
Beginning
Loop
Child
Spiral
Ends
Spirals
Without
Loops
Children
Endlessly
Slinky
Time
Continuous
Slinkies
Like
Toys
Overlapping
Scales
Ascending

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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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Write about winter in the summer. Describe Norway as Ibsen did, from a desk in Italy describe Dublin as James Joyce did, from a desk in Paris. Willa Cather wrote her prairie novels in New York City Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn in Hartford, Connecticut. Recently, scholars learned that Walt Whitman rarely left his room.
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At night I read and write, and things I have never understood become clear I reap the harvest of the rest of the year's planting
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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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I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.
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The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.
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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.
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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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As a life's work, I would remember everything - everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net.
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I woke at intervals until . . . the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not.
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The way to learn about a writer is to read the text. Or texts.
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Silence is not our heritage but our destiny we live where we want to live.
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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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As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.
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There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been.
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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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Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don't affair. A fish flashes, then dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much salt. Deer apparently ascend bodily into heaven the brightest oriole fades into leaves.
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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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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.
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For writing a first draft requires from the writer a peculiar internal state which ordinary life does not induce. ... how to set yourself spinning?
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