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The more you read, the more you will write. The better the stuff you read, the better the stuff you will write.

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
Stuff
Better
Writing
Read
Write

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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Does anything eat flowers. I couldn't recall having seen anything eat a flower - are they nature's privileged pets?
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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[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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What I call innocence is the spirit's unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once a receptiveness and total concentration.
Annie Dillard
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What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.
Annie Dillard
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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.
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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I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.
Annie Dillard
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I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.
Annie Dillard
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It should surprise no one that the life of the writer - such as it is - is colorless to the point of sensory deprivation. Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.
Annie Dillard
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For all the insularity of the old guard, Pittsburgh was always an open and democratic town.
Annie Dillard
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We wake, if ever at all, to mystery.
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
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Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation's short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit.
Annie Dillard
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By dipping us children in the Bible so often, they hoped, I think, to give our lives a serious tint, and to provide us with quaintly magnificent snatches of prayer to produce as charms while, say, being mugged for our cash or jewels.
Annie Dillard
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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.
Annie Dillard
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The mind wants the world to return its love, or its awareness the mind wants to know all the world, and all eternity, and God.
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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Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?
Annie Dillard
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When I first read the words 'introvert' and 'extrovert' when I was 10, I thought I was both.
Annie Dillard