Quote

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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Annie Dillard
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: April 30
Author
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Pittsburg
Pennsylvania
Annie Dillard Doak
Stories
Fit
Book
Projects
Nonfiction
Many
Novel
Pour
Writing
Bigs
Essays
Long
Learn
Ambitious
Write
Possess
Sense
Project
Makes
Narrative

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We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence.
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I feel as though I stand at the foot of an infinitely high staircase, down which some exuberant spirit is flinging tennis ball after tennis ball, eternally, and the one thing I want in the world is a tennis ball.
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As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.
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Your feelings are none of your business.
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The interior life is often stupid.
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We still and always want waking.
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Like everyone in his right mind, I feared Santa Claus.
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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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I would like to live. . . open to time and death painlessly, noticing everything, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will.
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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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There is no whit less enlightenment under the tree by your street than there was under the Buddha's bo tree. I invite you to go sit under that tree by your street.
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Like any child, I slid into myself perfectly fitted, as a diver meets her reflection in a pool. Her fingertips enter the fingertips on the water, her wrists slide up her arms. The diver wraps herself in her reflection wholly, sealing it at the toes, and wears it as she climbs rising from the pool, and ever after.
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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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We live in all we seek.
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We are here to witness the creation and to abet it.
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It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as separating us from our creator, our very self-consciousness, is also the one thing that divides us from our fellow creatures. It was a bitter birthday present from evolution.
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The novel is a game or joke shared between author and reader.
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I'm a housewife: I spend far more time on housework than anything else.
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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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How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
Annie Dillard