Quote

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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Annie Dillard
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: April 30
Author
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Pittsburg
Pennsylvania
Annie Dillard Doak
Seems
Judging
Fringe
Whole
Trade
Lunatic
Exult
Believe
Wouldn
Anarchy
Abounding
World
Creation
Existed
Fetched
Single
Revelations
Improbability
Common
Stock
Giraffe
Sense
Judge
Extremism
Nature
Claims
Likelihood

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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We wake, if ever at all, to mystery.
Annie Dillard
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Push it. examine all things intensely and relentlessly.
Annie Dillard
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People who take photographs during their whole vacation won't remember their vacation. They'll only remember what photographs they took.
Annie Dillard
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poetry has been able to function quite directly as human interpretation of the raw, loose universe. It is a mixture, if you will, of journalism and metaphysics, or of science and religion.
Annie Dillard
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What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.
Annie Dillard
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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.
Annie Dillard
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At night I read and write, and things I have never understood become clear I reap the harvest of the rest of the year's planting
Annie Dillard
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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?
Annie Dillard
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You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then-and only then-it is handed to you.
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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The mind wants the world to return its love, or its awareness the mind wants to know all the world, and all eternity, and God.
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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No one escapes the wilderness on the way to the promised land.
Annie Dillard
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The point of going somewhere like the Napo River in Ecuador is not to see the most spectacular anything. It is simply to see what is there.
Annie Dillard
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I saw in a blue haze all the world poured flat and pale between the mountains
Annie Dillard
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On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away.
Annie Dillard
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People who read are not too lazy to turn on the television they prefer books.
Annie Dillard
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The novel is a game or joke shared between author and reader.
Annie Dillard
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When I first read the words 'introvert' and 'extrovert' when I was 10, I thought I was both.
Annie Dillard
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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.
Annie Dillard