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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Old memories are very easy to get except that once you write about something you've destroyed it.
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I cannot cause light the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam.
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Writing a book is like rearing children -- willpower has very little to do with it. If you have a little baby crying in the middle of the night, and if you depend only on willpower to get you out of bed to feed the baby, that baby will starve. You do it out of love.
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The Pulitzer is more useful than meaningful.
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It could be that our faithlessness is a cowering cowardice born of our very smallness, a massive failure of imagination... If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldnt believe the world existed.
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No one escapes the wilderness on the way to the promised land.
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Just once I wanted a task that required all the joy I had. Day after day I had noticed that if I waited long enough, my strong unexpressed joy would dwindle and dissipate inside me, like a fire subsiding . . . . Just this once I wanted to let it rip.
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The mind of the writer does indeed do something before it dies, and so does its owner, but I would be hard put to call it living.
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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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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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The novel is a game or joke shared between author and reader.
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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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In literary history, generation follows generation in a rage.
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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?
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Nature's silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block.
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No child on earth was ever meant to be ordinary, and you can see it in them, and they know it, too, but then the times get to them, and the wear out their brains learning what folks expect, and spend their strength trying to rise over those same folks.
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I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you.
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I work mornings only. I go out to lunch. Afternoons I play with the baby, walk with my husband, or shovel mail.
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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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The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.
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