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If, as Heraclitus suggests, god, like an oracle, neither “declares nor hides, but sets forth by signs,” then clearly I had better be scrying the signs.

Annie Dillard
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So live. I'll be the nun for you. I am now.
Annie Dillard
Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.
Annie Dillard
There must be bands of enthusiasts for everything on earth-fanatics who shared a vocabulary a batch of technical skills and equipment and perhaps a vision of some single slice of the beauty and mystery of things of their complexity fascination and unexpectedness.
Annie Dillard
In literary history generation follows generation in a rage.
Annie Dillard
A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.
Annie Dillard
The dedicated life is the life worth living.
Annie Dillard
Somewhere and I can't find where I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked the local missionary priest 'If I did not know about God and sin would I go to hell?' 'No' said the priest 'not if you did not know.' 'Then why ' asked the Eskimo earnestly 'did you tell me?'
Annie Dillard
I saw to the south a man walking. He was breaking ground in perfect silence. He wore a harness and pulled a plow. His feet trod his figure's blue shadow, and the plow cut a long blue shadow in the field. He turned back as if to check the furrow, or as if he heard a call. Again I saw another man on the plain to the north. This man walked slowly with a spade, and turned the green ground under. Then before me in the near distance I saw the earth itself walking, the earth walking dark and aerated as it always does in every season, peeling the light back: The earth was plowing the men under, and the space, and the plow. No one sees us go under. No one sees generations churn, or civilizations. The green fields grow up forgetting. Ours is a planet sown in beings. Our generations overlap like shingles. We don't fall in rows like hay, but we fall. Once we get here, we spend forever on the globe, most of it tucked under. While we breathe, we open time like a path in the grass. We open time as a boat's stem slits the crest of the present.
Annie Dillard
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