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All my books started out as extravagant and ended up pure and plain.

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
Started
Books
Book
Extravagant
Plain
Ended
Pure

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Cruelty is a mystery, and a waste of pain.
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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.
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Old memories are very easy to get except that once you write about something you've destroyed it.
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[Insects] are not only cold-blooded, and green- and yellow-blooded, but are also cased in a clacking horn. They have rigid eyes and brains strung down their backs. But they make up the bulk of our comrades-at-life, so I look to them for a glimmer of companionship.
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Crystals grew inside rock like arithmetic flowers. They lengthened and spread, added plane to plane in an awed and perfect obedience to an absolute geometry that even stones - maybe only the stones - understood.
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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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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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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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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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Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we sense them.
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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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She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.
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Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.
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I have since only rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam.
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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
Annie Dillard
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A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order - willed, faked, and so brought into being.
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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.
Annie Dillard
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The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.
Annie Dillard
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There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.
Annie Dillard
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We are here on the planet only once, and might as well get a feel for the place.
Annie Dillard