Quote

The sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain. This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is.

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
Means
Impression
Sense
Animals
Celled
Mean
Animal
Mournful
Way
Brain
Philosophically
Since
Edited
Interesting
Impressions
Rather
Simplest
Universe
Perceive

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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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The novel is a game or joke shared between author and reader.
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We are here on the planet only once, and might as well get a feel for the place.
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Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.
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Cruelty is a mystery, and a waste of pain.
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People who take photographs during their whole vacation won't remember their vacation. They'll only remember what photographs they took.
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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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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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Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand - that of finding workable compromises between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us.
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Experiencing the present purely is being empty and hollow you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.
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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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If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed.
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Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we sense them.
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The more you read, the more you will write. The better the stuff you read, the better the stuff you will write.
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The mind wants the world to return its love, or its awareness the mind wants to know all the world, and all eternity, and God.
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We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence.
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All my books started out as extravagant and ended up pure and plain.
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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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Let the grass die. I let almost all of my indoor plants die from neglect while I was writing the book. There are all kinds of ways to live. You can take your choice. You can keep a tidy house, and when St. Peter asks you what you did with your life, you can say, I kept a tidy house, I made my own cheese balls.
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The way we live our days, is the way we live our lives.
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