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A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.

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
Writer
Alone
Looking
Best
Inquires
Loves
Subjects

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it.
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Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?
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An Inuit hunter asked the local missionary priest: If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell? No, said the priest, not if you did not know. Then why, asked the Inuit earnestly, did you tell me?
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Novels written with film contracts in mind have a faint but unmistakable, and ruinous, odor.
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Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.
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How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
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The courage of children and beasts is a function of innocence.
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Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf
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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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Divinity is not playful. The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensibl e earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and fleet. There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see.
Annie Dillard
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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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Private life, book life, took place where words met imagination without passing through the world.
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The way we live our days, is the way we live our lives.
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The body of literature, with its limits and edges, exists outside some people and inside others. Only after the writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature.
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Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.
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Aim for the chopping block. If you aim for the wood, you will have nothing. Aim past the wood, aim through the wood aim for the chopping block.
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Put yourself out of your misery.
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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.
Annie Dillard
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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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The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring.
Annie Dillard