Quote

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 It has been replaced by this changeling.

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
Much
Replaced
Way
Destroyed
Time
Finished
Think
Forgotten
Thinking
Exactly
Vision
Changeling
Wrong
Changelings
Take
Tame

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One of the few things I know about writing is this: Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book, give it, give it all, give it now.
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I wake expectant, hoping to see a new thing.
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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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The interior life is often stupid.
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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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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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I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.
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What is important is the moment of opening a life and feeling it touch--with an electric hiss and cry--this speckled mineral sphere, our present world.
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There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world lit or unlit as the light allows. When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it?
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When I first read the words 'introvert' and 'extrovert' when I was 10, I thought I was both.
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Silence is not our heritage but our destiny we live where we want to live.
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I don't know what it is about fecundity that so appalls. I suppose it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonishingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful, and that with extravagance goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives.
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Novels written with film contracts in mind have a faint but unmistakable, and ruinous, odor.
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It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping God may wake someday and take offense, or the waking God may draw us out to where we can never return.
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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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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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I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.
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Are you living just a little and calling that life?
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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 couldn't unpeach the peaches.
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