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

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I noticed this process of waking, and predicted with terrifying logic that one of these years not far away I would be awake continuously and never slip back, and never be free of myself again.
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The more you read, the more you will write. The better the stuff you read, the better the stuff you will write.
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Writers serve as the memory of a people. They chew over our public past.
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You can't test courage cautiously.
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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 had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.
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The reader's ear must adjust down from loud life to the subtle, imaginary sounds of the written word. An ordinary reader picking up a book can't yet hear a thing it will take half an hour to pick up the writing's modulations, its ups and downs and louds and softs.
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I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again.
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One of the few things I know about writing is this: Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book, give it, give it all, give it now.
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Push it. examine all things intensely and relentlessly.
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I'm a housewife: I spend far more time on housework than anything else.
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There is neither a proportional relationship, nor an inverse one, between a writer’s estimation of a work in progress & its actual quality. The feeling that the work is magnificent, & the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged.
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The world is wider in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain and Lazarus.
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The way to learn about a writer is to read the text. Or texts.
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The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper I cannot quite make it out.
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Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.
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Time is the warp and matter the weft of the woven texture of beauty in space, and death is the hurling shuttle.
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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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Books swept me away, this way and that, one after the other I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them.
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Nothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves.
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