Quotation by Annie Dillard

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Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974)The Writing Life (1989)"To Fashion a Text" Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, ed. William Zinsser, Houghton Mifflin (1987)

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experience (10) pain (10) death (6) sorrow (6) life (6) hope (5) love (5) happiness (5) nature (4) endurance (3)

Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a word to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and delight, the canary that sings on the skull.

Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard (b. 1945), U.S. essayist and autobiographer. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, ch. 1 (1974).

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