"This view requires that a monstrous world running on chance and death, careening blindly from nowhere to nowhere, somehow produced wonderful us. I came from the world, I crawled out of a sea of amino acids, and now I must whirl around and shake my fist at that sea, and cry Shame! If I value anything at all, then I must blindfold my eyes when I near the randomly shaped Swiss Alps. We must as a culture disassemble our telescopes and settle down to backslapping. We little blobs of soft tissue crawling around on this one planet's skin are right, and the whole universe is wrong."
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Novelists from the United StatesEssayists from the United StatesNon-fiction authors from the United StatesWomen academics from the United StatesPeople from Pittsburgh
Original Language: English
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Sources
"The Force That Drives the Flower", The Atlantic, Nov. 1973
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Annie_Dillard
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Annie Dillard
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