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I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.
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
Life
Struck
Bells
Inspiring
Knew
Moment
Moments
Whole
Lifted
Never
Bell
More quotes by Annie Dillard
For writing a first draft requires from the writer a peculiar internal state which ordinary life does not induce. ... how to set yourself spinning?
Annie Dillard
The world is wider in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain and Lazarus.
Annie Dillard
Johnston's books are beautifully written and among the funniest I have ever read.
Annie Dillard
Are you living just a little and calling that life?
Annie Dillard
Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you.
Annie Dillard
Time is the warp and matter the weft of the woven texture of beauty in space, and death is the hurling shuttle.
Annie Dillard
Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.
Annie Dillard
There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been.
Annie Dillard
I saw in a blue haze all the world poured flat and pale between the mountains
Annie Dillard
As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.
Annie Dillard
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
I wake expectant, hoping to see a new thing.
Annie Dillard
We are here on the planet only once, and might as well get a feel for the place.
Annie Dillard
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
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
You can't test courage cautiously.
Annie Dillard
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.
Annie Dillard
The reader's ear must adjust down from loud life to the subtle, imaginary sounds of the written word. An ordinary reader picking up a book can't yet hear a thing it will take half an hour to pick up the writing's modulations, its ups and downs and louds and softs.
Annie Dillard
The more you read, the more you will write. The better the stuff you read, the better the stuff you will write.
Annie Dillard
When I first read the words 'introvert' and 'extrovert' when I was 10, I thought I was both.
Annie Dillard