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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
Love
Alone
Secret
Write
Best
Writing

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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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 more you read, the more you will write. The better the stuff you read, the better the stuff you will write.
Annie Dillard
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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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We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet.
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The interior life is often stupid.
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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.
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These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.
Annie Dillard
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If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed.
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She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.
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It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.
Annie Dillard
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At night I read and write, and things I have never understood become clear I reap the harvest of the rest of the year's planting
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What have we been doing all these centuries but trying to call God back to the mountain, or, failing that, raise a peep out of anything that isn't us? What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are not they both saying: Hello? We spy on whales and on interstellar radio objects we starve ourselves and pray till we're blue.
Annie Dillard
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Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a word to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and delight, the canary that sings on the skull.
Annie Dillard
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The dear, stupid body is as easily satisfied as a spaniel.
Annie Dillard
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I have since only rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam.
Annie Dillard
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Just think: in all the clean, beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a blot our planet alone has death.
Annie Dillard
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Doing something does not require discipline. It creates its own discipline - with a little help from caffeine.
Annie Dillard
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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?
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.
Annie Dillard
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For all the insularity of the old guard, Pittsburgh was always an open and democratic town.
Annie Dillard