Quote

What I call innocence is the spirit's unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once a receptiveness and total concentration.

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
Moment
Innocence
Spirit
Total
Moments
Object
States
Conscious
Objects
Pure
Receptiveness
Call
Concentration
State
Devotion

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Every spring he vowed to quit teaching school, and every summer he missed his pupils and searched for them on the streets.
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What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
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He judged the instant and let go he flung himself loose into the stars.
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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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Trees have a curious relationship to the subject of the present moment. There are many created things in the universe that outlive us, that outlive the sun, even, but I can't think about them. I live with trees.
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When you write, you lay out a line of words. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory.
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Admire the world for never ending on you -- as you would an opponent, without taking your eyes away from him, or walking away.
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The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.
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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 saw in a blue haze all the world poured flat and pale between the mountains
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You have to take pains in a memoir not to hang on the reader's arm, like a drunk, and say, 'And then I did this and it was so interesting.
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Aim for the chopping block. If you aim for the wood, you will have nothing. Aim past the wood, aim through the wood aim for the chopping block.
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I worked so hard all my life, and all I want to do now is read.
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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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if you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not.
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I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers.
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But enough is enough. One turns at last even from glory itself with a sigh of relief. From the depths of mystery, and even from the heights of splendor, we bounce back and hurry for the latitudes of home.
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Novels written with film contracts in mind have a faint but unmistakable, and ruinous, odor.
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The mind itself is an art object ... The mind is a blue guitar on which we improvise the song of the world.
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Self-consciousness is the curse of the city and all that sophistication implies.
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