Quote

You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it to the page. The page is jealous and tyrannical the page is made of time and matter the page always wins.

Annie Dillard

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Annie Dillard
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: April 30
Author
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Pittsburg
Pennsylvania
Annie Dillard Doak
Thinking
Wrong
Tyrannical
Matter
Tame
Take
Wins
Made
Jealous
Way
Page
Always
Pages
Time
Vision
Think
Winning

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We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence.
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It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave.
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It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping God may wake someday and take offense, or the waking God may draw us out to where we can never return.
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Let the grass die. I let almost all of my indoor plants die from neglect while I was writing the book. There are all kinds of ways to live. You can take your choice. You can keep a tidy house, and when St. Peter asks you what you did with your life, you can say, I kept a tidy house, I made my own cheese balls.
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I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too.
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The Pulitzer is more useful than meaningful.
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There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.
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By dipping us children in the Bible so often, they hoped, I think, to give our lives a serious tint, and to provide us with quaintly magnificent snatches of prayer to produce as charms while, say, being mugged for our cash or jewels.
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Landscape consists in the multiple, overlapping intricacies and forms that exist in a given space at a moment in time.
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Nature seems to exult in abounding radicality, extremism, anarchy. If we were to judge nature by its common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed. In nature, improbabilities are the one stock in trade. The whole creation is one lunatic fringe. ... No claims of any and all revelations could be so far-fetched as a single giraffe.
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The novel is a game or joke shared between author and reader.
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The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest.
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When you write, you lay out a line of words. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory.
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No one can help you if you're stuck in a work. Only you can figure a way out, because only you can see the work's possibilities.
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I think the dying pray at the last not please, but thank you, as a guest thanks his host at the door.
Annie Dillard
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if you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not.
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It makes more sense to write one big book - a novel or nonfiction narrative - than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all you possess and learn.
Annie Dillard
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The life of sensation is the life of greed it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less.
Annie Dillard
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Unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous.
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Nothing on earth is more gladdening than knowing we must roll up our sleeves and move back the boundaries of the humanly possible once more.
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