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For all the insularity of the old guard, Pittsburgh was always an open and democratic town.

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
Democratic
Cities
Open
Always
Insularity
Pittsburgh
Guard
Town
Towns

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Just once I wanted a task that required all the joy I had. Day after day I had noticed that if I waited long enough, my strong unexpressed joy would dwindle and dissipate inside me, like a fire subsiding . . . . Just this once I wanted to let it rip.
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Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.
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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.
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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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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
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Fiction keeps its audience by retaining the world as its subject matter. People like the world. Many people actually prefer it to art and spend their days by choice in the thick of it.
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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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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.
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Landscape consists in the multiple, overlapping intricacies and forms that exist in a given space at a moment in time.
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Don't save something good for a later place. Don't hold back from your students, from the poor, don't try to keep anything for yourself 'cause it'll turn to ashes.
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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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if you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not.
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We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all.
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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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What is a house but a bigger skin, and a neighborhood map but the world's skin ever expanding?
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A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order - willed, faked, and so brought into being.
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As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.
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When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner's pick, a wood carver's gouge, a surgeon's probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year.
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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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Geography is the key, the crucial accident of birth. A piece of protein could be a snail, a sea lion, or a systems analyst, but it had to start somewhere. This is not science it is merely metaphor. And the landscape in which the protein starts shapes its end as surely as bowls shape water.
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