Quote

On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away.

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
Days
Four
Write
Away
Concludes
Three
Plenty
Must
Throw
Writing
Pages
Writer

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Does anything eat flowers. I couldn't recall having seen anything eat a flower - are they nature's privileged pets?
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The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring. It is the sensation of a stunt pilot's turning barrel rolls, or an inchworm's blind rearing from a stem in search of a route. At its worst, it feels like alligator wrestling, at the level of the sentence.
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I still try to keep my eyes open. I'm always on the lookout for antlion traps in sandy soil, monarch pupae near milkweed, skipper larvae in locust leaves. These things are utterly common, and I've not seen one
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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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I have since only rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam.
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As a life's work, I would remember everything - everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net.
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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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Young children have no sense of wonder. They bewilder well, but few things surprise them. All of it is new to young children, after all, and equally gratuitous.
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We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us.
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I can't dance anymore. Total knee replacements. I can't do anything anymore.
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We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet.
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Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.
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He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write. He is careful of what he learns, for that is what he will know.
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Johnston's books are beautifully written and among the funniest I have ever read.
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Those of us who read carried around with us like martyrs a secret knowledge, a secret joy, and a secret hope: There is a life worth living where history is still taking place there are ideas worth dying for, and circumstances where courage is still prized.
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A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.
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You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it... The vision is not so much destroyed, exactly, as it is, by the time you have finished, forgotten. It has been replaced by this changeling.
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What is important is the moment of opening a life and feeling it touch--with an electric hiss and cry--this speckled mineral sphere, our present world.
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I saw in a blue haze all the world poured flat and pale between the mountains
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We still and always want waking.
Annie Dillard