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Push it. examine all things intensely and relentlessly.

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
Things
Relentlessly
Intensely
Examine
Push

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.
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I woke at intervals until . . . the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not.
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It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.
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No one can help you if you're stuck in a work. Only you can figure a way out, because only you can see the work's possibilities.
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[Insects] are not only cold-blooded, and green- and yellow-blooded, but are also cased in a clacking horn. They have rigid eyes and brains strung down their backs. But they make up the bulk of our comrades-at-life, so I look to them for a glimmer of companionship.
Annie Dillard
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It makes more sense to write one big book - a novel or nonfiction narrative - than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all you possess and learn.
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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The mind itself is an art object ... The mind is a blue guitar on which we improvise the song of the world.
Annie Dillard
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I think the dying pray at the last not please, but thank you, as a guest thanks his host at the door.
Annie Dillard
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It could be that our faithlessness is a cowering cowardice born of our very smallness, a massive failure of imagination... If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldnt believe the world existed.
Annie Dillard
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Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.
Annie Dillard
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A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.
Annie Dillard
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I wake expectant, hoping to see a new thing.
Annie Dillard
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No one escapes the wilderness on the way to the promised land.
Annie Dillard
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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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Write about winter in the summer. Describe Norway as Ibsen did, from a desk in Italy describe Dublin as James Joyce did, from a desk in Paris. Willa Cather wrote her prairie novels in New York City Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn in Hartford, Connecticut. Recently, scholars learned that Walt Whitman rarely left his room.
Annie Dillard
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The universe is illusion merely, not one speck of it real, and we are not only its victims, falling always into or smashed by a planet slung by the sun-but also its captives, bound by the mineral-made ropes of our senses.
Annie Dillard
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Novels written with film contracts in mind have a faint but unmistakable, and ruinous, odor.
Annie Dillard
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poetry has been able to function quite directly as human interpretation of the raw, loose universe. It is a mixture, if you will, of journalism and metaphysics, or of science and religion.
Annie Dillard
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The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper I cannot quite make it out.
Annie Dillard