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It should surprise no one that the life of the writer - such as it is - is colorless to the point of sensory deprivation. Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.

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
Many
Writers
Real
Writer
Life
Rooms
World
Small
Recalling
Point
Colorless
Else
Deprivation
Littles
Sensory
Little
Surprise

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The life of sensation is the life of greed it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less.
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A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.
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Books swept me away, this way and that, one after the other I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them.
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Silence is not our heritage but our destiny we live where we want to live.
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I know only enough of God to want to worship him, by any means ready to hand.
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The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper I cannot quite make it out.
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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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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 It has been replaced by this changeling.
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You do what you do out of your private love of the thing itself.
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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 way we live our days, is the way we live our lives.
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I noticed this process of waking, and predicted with terrifying logic that one of these years not far away I would be awake continuously and never slip back, and never be free of myself again.
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Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.
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We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet.
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The surest sign of age is loneliness.
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Divinity is not playful. The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensibl e earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and fleet. There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see.
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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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Young children have no sense of wonder. They bewilder well, but few things surprise them. All of it is new to young children, after all, and equally gratuitous.
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Nothing on earth is more gladdening than knowing we must roll up our sleeves and move back the boundaries of the humanly possible once more.
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Whenever an encounter between a writer of good will and a regular person of good will happens to touch on the subject of writing, each person discovers, dismayed, that good will is of no earthly use. The conversation cannot proceed.
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