Quote

About five years ago I saw a mockingbird make a straight vertical descent from the roof gutter of a four-story building. It was an act as careless and spontaneous as the curl of a stem or the kindling of a star.

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
Story
Roof
Mockingbird
Stories
Straight
Gutters
Years
Star
Vertical
Make
Saws
Curls
Building
Descent
Stars
Careless
Kindling
Four
Stem
Gutter
Five
Spontaneous
Curl

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He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write. He is careful of what he learns, for that is what he will know.
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When I first read the words 'introvert' and 'extrovert' when I was 10, I thought I was both.
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Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.
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The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.
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I cannot cause light the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam.
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There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been.
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The world knew you before you knew the world.
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I have since only rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam.
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You can serve or you can sing, and wreck your heart in prayer, working the world's hard work.
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Having chosen this foolishness, I was a free being. How could the world ever stop me, how could I betray myself, if I was not afraid?
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Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.
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We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall.
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I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again.
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Almost all of my many passionate interests, and my many changes of mind, came through books. Books prompted the many vows I made to myself.
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Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.
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The dear, stupid body is as easily satisfied as a spaniel.
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There is neither a proportional relationship, nor an inverse one, between a writer’s estimation of a work in progress & its actual quality. The feeling that the work is magnificent, & the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged.
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