Quote

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

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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
Writing
Requires
Life
Ordinary
Writer
Induce
State
Draft
Doe
Spinning
States
Internals
Firsts
Internal
First
Peculiar

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Writers serve as the memory of a people. They chew over our public past.
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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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You can't test courage cautiously.
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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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I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.
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Divinity is not playful. The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensibl e earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and fleet. There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see.
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Doing something does not require discipline. It creates its own discipline - with a little help from caffeine.
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Johnston's books are beautifully written and among the funniest I have ever read.
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Admire the world for never ending on you -- as you would an opponent, without taking your eyes away from him, or walking away.
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I don't know what it is about fecundity that so appalls. I suppose it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonishingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful, and that with extravagance goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives.
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The surest sign of age is loneliness.
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But enough is enough. One turns at last even from glory itself with a sigh of relief. From the depths of mystery, and even from the heights of splendor, we bounce back and hurry for the latitudes of home.
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Landscape consists in the multiple, overlapping intricacies and forms that exist in a given space at a moment in time.
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Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don't affair. A fish flashes, then dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much salt. Deer apparently ascend bodily into heaven the brightest oriole fades into leaves.
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I wake expectant, hoping to see a new thing.
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For all the insularity of the old guard, Pittsburgh was always an open and democratic town.
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These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.
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The irrational haunts the metaphysical.
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No, the point is not only does time fly and do we die, but that in these reckless conditions we live at all, and are vouchsafed, for the duration of certain inexplicable moments, to know it.
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Books swept me away, this way and that, one after the other I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them.
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