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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.

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
Searched
Teaching
Pupils
School
Missed
Every
Quit
Quitting
Summer
Spring
Vowed
Streets

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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I don't know what it is about fecundity that so appalls. I suppose it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonishingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful, and that with extravagance goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives.
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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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Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we sense them.
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The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest.
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Our life seems cursed to be a wiggle merely, and a wandering without end.
Annie Dillard
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I wake expectant, hoping to see a new thing.
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Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation's short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit.
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?
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I think the dying pray at the last not please, but thank you, as a guest thanks his host at the door.
Annie Dillard
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The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.
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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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The creatures I seek do not want to be seen.
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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 breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers.
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The creative process obtains in all creative acts. So if I'm painting suddenly I'll see something that I didn't see before.
Annie Dillard
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The universe that suckled us is a monster that does not care if we live or die--it does not care if it itself grinds to a halt. It is a beast running on chance and death, careening from nowhere to nowhere. It is fixed and blind, a robot programmed to kill. We are free and seeing we can only try to outwit it at every turn to save our lives.
Annie Dillard
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Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?
Annie Dillard
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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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Silence is not our heritage but our destiny we live where we want to live.
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Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.
Annie Dillard