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

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It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.
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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.
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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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An Eskimo shaman said, Life's greatest danger lies in the fact that man's food consists entirely of souls.
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Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.
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We are here to abet creation and to witness to it, to notice each other's beautiful face and complex nature so that creation need not play to an empty house.
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Then why did you tell me?
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Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we sense them.
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Every day is a god, each day is a god, and holiness holds forth in time.
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I am sorry I ran from you. I am still running, running from that knowledge, that eye, that love from which there is no refuge. For you meant only love, and love, and I felt only fear, and pain. So once in Israel love came to us incarnate, stood in the doorway between two worlds, and we were all afraid.
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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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The silence is all there is. It is the alpha and the omega, it is God's brooding over the face of the waters it is the blinded note of the ten thousand things, the whine of wings. You take a step in the right direction to pray to this silence, and even to address the prayer to World. Distinctions blur. Quit your tents. Pray without ceasing.
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Doing something does not require discipline. It creates its own discipline - with a little help from caffeine.
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Like any child, I slid into myself perfectly fitted, as a diver meets her reflection in a pool. Her fingertips enter the fingertips on the water, her wrists slide up her arms. The diver wraps herself in her reflection wholly, sealing it at the toes, and wears it as she climbs rising from the pool, and ever after.
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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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why did I have to keep learning this same thing over and over?
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We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall.
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