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The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love 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
Best
Writing
Love
Alone
Secret
Write

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as a dying friend. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.
Annie Dillard
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The mind wants the world to return its love, or its awareness the mind wants to know all the world, and all eternity, and God.
Annie Dillard
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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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The creative process obtains in all creative acts. So if I'm painting suddenly I'll see something that I didn't see before.
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Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you.
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Our life seems cursed to be a wiggle merely, and a wandering without end.
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We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence.
Annie Dillard
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Crystals grew inside rock like arithmetic flowers. They lengthened and spread, added plane to plane in an awed and perfect obedience to an absolute geometry that even stones - maybe only the stones - understood.
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Almost all of my many passionate interests, and my many changes of mind, came through books. Books prompted the many vows I made to myself.
Annie Dillard
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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 still and always want waking.
Annie Dillard
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Are you living just a little and calling that life?
Annie Dillard
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I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.
Annie Dillard
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When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner's pick, a wood carver's gouge, a surgeon's probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year.
Annie Dillard
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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.
Annie Dillard
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Writers serve as the memory of a people. They chew over our public past.
Annie Dillard
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I still try to keep my eyes open. I'm always on the lookout for antlion traps in sandy soil, monarch pupae near milkweed, skipper larvae in locust leaves. These things are utterly common, and I've not seen one
Annie Dillard
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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.
Annie Dillard
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Trees have a curious relationship to the subject of the present moment. There are many created things in the universe that outlive us, that outlive the sun, even, but I can't think about them. I live with trees.
Annie Dillard
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We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all.
Annie Dillard