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The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest.

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
Incomprehensible
Jest
Solemn
Earnest
Universe
Made

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.
Annie Dillard
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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.
Annie Dillard
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Silence is not our heritage but our destiny we live where we want to live.
Annie Dillard
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I had been chipping at the world idly, and had by accident uncovered vast and labyrinthine further worlds within it.
Annie Dillard
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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.
Annie Dillard
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A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.
Annie Dillard
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Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.
Annie Dillard
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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.
Annie Dillard
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I woke at intervals until . . . the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not.
Annie Dillard
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You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it to the page. The page is jealous and tyrannical the page is made of time and matter the page always wins.
Annie Dillard
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It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave.
Annie Dillard
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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.
Annie Dillard
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The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.
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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Who and of what import were the men whose bones bulk the Great Wall, the thirty million Mao starved, or the thirty million children not yet five who die each year now? Why, they are the insignificant others, of course living or dead, they are just some of the plentiful others...And you? To what end were we billions of oddballs born?
Annie Dillard
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Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.
Annie Dillard
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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.
Annie Dillard
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The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.
Annie Dillard
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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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Skin was earth it was soil. I could see, even on my own skin, the joined trapezoids of dust specks God had wetted and stuck with his spit the morning he made Adam from dirt. Now, all these generations later, we people could still see on our skin the inherited prints of the dust specks of Eden.
Annie Dillard