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
Moments
Object
States
Conscious
Objects
Pure
Receptiveness
Call
Concentration
State
Devotion
Moment
Innocence
Spirit
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More quotes by Annie Dillard

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There is no whit less enlightenment under the tree by your street than there was under the Buddha's bo tree. I invite you to go sit under that tree by your street.
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Our life seems cursed to be a wiggle merely, and a wandering without end.
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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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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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I alternate between thinking of the planet as home - dear and familiar stone hearth and garden - and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners.
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Johnston's books are beautifully written and among the funniest I have ever read.
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We wake, if ever at all, to mystery.
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Those of us who read carried around with us like martyrs a secret knowledge, a secret joy, and a secret hope: There is a life worth living where history is still taking place there are ideas worth dying for, and circumstances where courage is still prized.
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Dan Gerber is one of our finest living poets.
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I can't dance anymore. Total knee replacements. I can't do anything anymore.
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I saw in a blue haze all the world poured flat and pale between the mountains
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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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It makes more sense to write one big book - a novel or nonfiction narrative - than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all you possess and learn.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper I cannot quite make it out.
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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The dear, stupid body is as easily satisfied as a spaniel.
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