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"I smelled silt on the wind, turkey, laundry, leaves . . . my God what a world. There is no accounting for one second of it (267)."
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Exlpore more Perception quotes
"Even if everybody is looking at the same light bulb, the unique composition of an individual will dictate how they interpret and see things. Some people will only see things with their left eye (mind/moon), while others will use only their right (heart/sun). Some people are completely void of light and repel it immediately. For instance, a beetle will chase after an opening of light, while a cockroach will scatter at a crack of it. How are we different than the insects? Nobody is purely good or purely evil. Most of us are in-between. There are moths that explore the day and butterflies that play at night. Polarity is an integral part of nature - human or not human."
"Don't allow your imagination to colour events as lesser men would, and see movement in motionless things."
"For us, a pretty bird is a pretty bird; for an insect, pretty bird is an ugly enemy!"
"Appearance matters, we see your presentation before we get a chance to sample the substance within. You might miss a chance for the latter."
"There are many degrees of sight and many degrees of blindness. What senses do we lack that we cannot see another world all around us?"
"Everything is just how I imagined it, yet everything is new."
"Hatred, as well as love, renders its votaries credulous."
"But there's so much that was a lie, it's hard to figure out what was true, what was real, what matters."
Explore more quotes by Annie Dillard
"There are 1,198,500,000 people alive now in China. To get a feel for what that means, simply take yourself - in all your singularity, importance, complexity, and love - and multiply by 1,198,500,000. See? Nothing to it."
"The mountains are great stone bells; they clang together like nuns. Who shushed the stars? There are a thousand million galaxies easily seen in the Palomar reflector; collisions between and among them do, of course, occur. But these collisions are very long and silent slides. Billions of stars sift amont each other untouched, too distant even to be moved, heedless as always, hushed. The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper; I cannot quite make it out. But God knows I have tried."
"I am a sacrifice bound with cords to the horns of the world's rock altar, waiting for worms. I take a deep breath, I open my eyes. Looking, I see there are worms in the horns of the altar like live maggots in amber, there are shells of worms in the rock and moths flapping at my eyes. A wind from no place rises. A sense of the real exults me; the cords loosen: I walk on my way."
"For writing a first draft requires from the writer a peculiar internal state which ordinary life does not induce. ... how to set yourself spinning?"
"So it is that a writer writes many books. In each book, he intended several urgent and vivid points, many of which he sacrificed as the book's form hardened."
"The answer must be, I think, that the beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there."
"We are here to witness. There is nothing else to do with those mute materials we do not need. Until Larry teaches his stone to talk, until God changes his mind, or until the pagan gods slip back to their hilltop groves, all we can do with the whole inhuman array is watch it."
"It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale."
"The most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one's own most intimate sensitivity."
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