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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

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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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.
Annie Dillard
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Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you.
Annie Dillard
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Cruelty is a mystery, and a waste of pain.
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Nothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves.
Annie Dillard
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You do what you do out of your private love of the thing itself.
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The sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain. This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is.
Annie Dillard
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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.
Annie Dillard
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Painters work from the ground up. The latest version of a painting overlays earlier versions, and obliterates them. Writers, on the other hand, work from left to right. The discardable chapters are on the left.
Annie Dillard
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Nature seems to exult in abounding radicality, extremism, anarchy. If we were to judge nature by its common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed. In nature, improbabilities are the one stock in trade. The whole creation is one lunatic fringe. ... No claims of any and all revelations could be so far-fetched as a single giraffe.
Annie Dillard
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We wake, if ever at all, to mystery.
Annie Dillard
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There is neither a proportional relationship, nor an inverse one, between a writer’s estimation of a work in progress & its actual quality. The feeling that the work is magnificent, & the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged.
Annie Dillard
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I woke at intervals until . . . the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not.
Annie Dillard
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Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
Annie Dillard
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Silence is not our heritage but our destiny we live where we want to live.
Annie Dillard
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We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall.
Annie Dillard
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There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.
Annie Dillard
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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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I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too.
Annie Dillard
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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.
Annie Dillard
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According to Inuit culture in Greenland, a person possesses six or seven souls. The souls take the form of tiny people scattered throughout the body.
Annie Dillard