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

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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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[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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You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then-and only then-it is handed to you.
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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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I think the dying pray at the last not please, but thank you, as a guest thanks his host at the door.
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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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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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People who read are not too lazy to turn on the television they prefer books.
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The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring.
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Whenever there is stillness there is the still small voice, God's speaking from the whirlwind, nature's old song, and dance.
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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.
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I know only enough of God to want to worship him, by any means ready to hand.
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No, the point is not only does time fly and do we die, but that in these reckless conditions we live at all, and are vouchsafed, for the duration of certain inexplicable moments, to know it.
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We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us.
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Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
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I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again.
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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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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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Unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous.
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When you write, you lay out a line of words. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory.
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