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Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand - that of finding workable compromises between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us.

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
Absurdity
Facts
Hands
Wherever
Seems
Compromise
Ideas
Findings
Finding
Workable
Hand
Sublimity
Fact
Compromises
Business

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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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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The universe that suckled us is a monster that does not care if we live or die--it does not care if it itself grinds to a halt. It is a beast running on chance and death, careening from nowhere to nowhere. It is fixed and blind, a robot programmed to kill. We are free and seeing we can only try to outwit it at every turn to save our lives.
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The way to learn about a writer is to read the text. Or texts.
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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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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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Our life seems cursed to be a wiggle merely, and a wandering without end.
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The interior life is often stupid.
Annie Dillard
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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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The Pulitzer is more useful than meaningful.
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I know only enough of God to want to worship him, by any means ready to hand.
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You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it to the page. The page is jealous and tyrannical the page is made of time and matter the page always wins.
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The creatures I seek do not want to be seen.
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It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping God may wake someday and take offense, or the waking God may draw us out to where we can never return.
Annie Dillard
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The way we live our days, is the way we live our lives.
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Fiction keeps its audience by retaining the world as its subject matter. People like the world. Many people actually prefer it to art and spend their days by choice in the thick of it.
Annie Dillard
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What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
Annie Dillard
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I'm a housewife: I spend far more time on housework than anything else.
Annie Dillard
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She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.
Annie Dillard
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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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if you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not.
Annie Dillard