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"In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them farther over the world's rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here. This is given. It is not learned."
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"The leaves of hopes which have destined words in the body of the thought have settled to the ground. This is the world."
"The world will see true peace when there are no boundaries of religion and the religion of all will be pure unconditional love."
"We cannot escape our origins, however hard we try, those origins which contain the key -could we but find it- to all we later become."
"The Bible warns [parents] against extremes in dealing with our adult children. It tells us to avoid trying to control [them] once they become adults. When children become independent, a major transition takes place: They are no longer under our authority."
"There is a coherence in things, a stability; something... is immune from change and shines out... in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby."
"This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction. (...) Forever I shall be a stranger to myself."
"Know thyself, presume not God to scan;The proper study of mankind is man."
"I am engaged in spiritual warfare every day. I must never let down my guard-I must keep armed."
"Simplicity is, as simple as you make it."
Explore more quotes by Annie Dillard
"I smelled silt on the wind, turkey, laundry, leaves . . . my God what a world. There is no accounting for one second of it (267)."
"Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles."
"I was in no tent under leaves, sleepless and glad. There was no moon at all; along the world's coasts the sea tides would be springing strong. The air itself also has lunar tides; I lay still. Could I feel in the air an invisible sweep and surge, and an answering knock in the lungs? Or could I feel the starlight? Every minute on a square mile of this land one ten thousandth of an ounce of starlight spatters to earth. What percentage of an ounce did that make on my eyes and cheeks and arms, tapping and nudging as particles, pulsing and stroking as waves?"
"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 writer studies literature, not the world. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write."
"I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again."
"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."
"Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark."
"Aim for the chopping block. If you aim for the wood, you will have nothing. Aim past the wood, aim through the wood; aim for the chopping block."
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