Quote

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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Annie Dillard
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: April 30
Author
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Pittsburg
Pennsylvania
Annie Dillard Doak
Hope
Write
Hands
Better
Book
Dying
Writing
Friend
Much
Hold
Hand

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Novels written with film contracts in mind have a faint but unmistakable, and ruinous, odor.
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If we listened to our intellect, we’d never have a love affair... or go into business. You’ve got to jump off cliffs and build your wings on the way down.
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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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Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.
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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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Johnston's books are beautifully written and among the funniest I have ever read.
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Make connections let rip and dance where you can.
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She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.
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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.
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Adverbs are a sign that you've used the wrong verb.
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Ecstasy, I think, is a soul's response to the waves holiness makes as it nears.
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The irrational haunts the metaphysical.
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At a certain point, you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening.
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I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers.
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I write in my own journal when something extraordinary or funny happens. And there's some nice imagery in there. I don't think of what to do with it.
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People who read are not too lazy to turn on the television they prefer books.
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Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.
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Love so sprang at her, she honestly thought no one had ever looked into it. Where was it in literature? Someone would have written something. She must not have recognized it. Time to read everything again.
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The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring.
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I couldn't unpeach the peaches.
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