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
Made
Jealous
Way
Page
Always
Pages
Time
Vision
Think
Winning
Thinking
Wrong
Tyrannical
Matter
Tame
Take
Wins

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand - that of finding workable compromises between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us.
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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.
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I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.
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Every spring he vowed to quit teaching school, and every summer he missed his pupils and searched for them on the streets.
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She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.
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Admire the world for never ending on you -- as you would an opponent, without taking your eyes away from him, or walking away.
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As a life's work, I would remember everything - everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net.
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The irrational haunts the metaphysical.
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We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall.
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When I first read the words 'introvert' and 'extrovert' when I was 10, I thought I was both.
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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.
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No, the point is not only does time fly and do we die, but that in these reckless conditions we live at all, and are vouchsafed, for the duration of certain inexplicable moments, to know it.
Annie Dillard
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I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.
Annie Dillard
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Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.
Annie Dillard
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The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.
Annie Dillard
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Young children have no sense of wonder. They bewilder well, but few things surprise them. All of it is new to young children, after all, and equally gratuitous.
Annie Dillard
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There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world lit or unlit as the light allows. When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it?
Annie Dillard
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I know only enough of God to want to worship him, by any means ready to hand.
Annie Dillard
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Write about winter in the summer. Describe Norway as Ibsen did, from a desk in Italy describe Dublin as James Joyce did, from a desk in Paris. Willa Cather wrote her prairie novels in New York City Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn in Hartford, Connecticut. Recently, scholars learned that Walt Whitman rarely left his room.
Annie Dillard
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The creatures I seek do not want to be seen.
Annie Dillard