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The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.

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
Extravagant
Gesture
Gestures
Creation
Stuff
Life

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The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper I cannot quite make it out.
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I couldn't unpeach the peaches.
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You can't test courage cautiously, so I ran hard and waved my arms hard, happy.
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I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you.
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She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.
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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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The creatures I seek do not want to be seen.
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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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Are you living just a little and calling that life?
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Time is the warp and matter the weft of the woven texture of beauty in space, and death is the hurling shuttle.
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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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I had been chipping at the world idly, and had by accident uncovered vast and labyrinthine further worlds within it.
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You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it... The vision is not so much destroyed, exactly, as it is, by the time you have finished, forgotten. It has been replaced by this changeling.
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Time is the continuous loop, the snakeskin with scales endlessly overlapping without beginning or end, or time is an ascending spiral if you will, like a child's toy Slinky.
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You do what you do out of your private love of the thing itself.
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The surest sign of age is loneliness.
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The novel is a game or joke shared between author and reader.
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What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.
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What have we been doing all these centuries but trying to call God back to the mountain, or, failing that, raise a peep out of anything that isn't us? What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are not they both saying: Hello? We spy on whales and on interstellar radio objects we starve ourselves and pray till we're blue.
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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.
Annie Dillard