Quote

The universe is illusion merely, not one speck of it real, and we are not only its victims, falling always into or smashed by a planet slung by the sun-but also its captives, bound by the mineral-made ropes of our senses.

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
Made
Illusion
Rope
Slung
Always
Merely
Victims
Mineral
Planets
Bound
Ropes
Sun
Falling
Speck
Universe
Bounds
Smashed
Fall
Senses
Specks
Also
Victim
Captives
Real
Planet
Minerals

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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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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if you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not.
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The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring.
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Admire the world for never ending on you -- as you would an opponent, without taking your eyes away from him, or walking away.
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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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Nature seems to exult in abounding radicality, extremism, anarchy. If we were to judge nature by its common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed. In nature, improbabilities are the one stock in trade. The whole creation is one lunatic fringe. ... No claims of any and all revelations could be so far-fetched as a single giraffe.
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poetry has been able to function quite directly as human interpretation of the raw, loose universe. It is a mixture, if you will, of journalism and metaphysics, or of science and religion.
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Nature's silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block.
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People who read are not too lazy to turn on the television they prefer books.
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It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping God may wake someday and take offense, or the waking God may draw us out to where we can never return.
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The point of going somewhere like the Napo River in Ecuador is not to see the most spectacular anything. It is simply to see what is there.
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Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.
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I couldn't unpeach the peaches.
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The world is wider in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain and Lazarus.
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Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.
Annie Dillard
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You do what you do out of your private love of the thing itself.
Annie Dillard
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The irrational haunts the metaphysical.
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Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.
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Just think: in all the clean, beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a blot our planet alone has death.
Annie Dillard
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You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then-and only then-it is handed to you.
Annie Dillard