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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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Annie Dillard
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: April 30
Author
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Pittsburg
Pennsylvania
Annie Dillard Doak
Impossibility
Excitement
Soon
Writer
Firsts
Book
Dwindles
First
Discovers
Every
Intrinsic

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed.
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Private life, book life, took place where words met imagination without passing through the world.
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Push it. examine all things intensely and relentlessly.
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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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Aim for the chopping block. If you aim for the wood, you will have nothing. Aim past the wood, aim through the wood aim for the chopping block.
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why did I have to keep learning this same thing over and over?
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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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I don't know what it is about fecundity that so appalls. I suppose it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonishingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful, and that with extravagance goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives.
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I can't dance anymore. Total knee replacements. I can't do anything anymore.
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I wake expectant, hoping to see a new thing.
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It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave. It is hard to desecrate a grove and change your mind. The very holy mountains are keeping mum. We doused the burning bush and cannot rekindle it we are lighting matches in vain under every green tree.
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Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.
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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.
Annie Dillard
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Self-consciousness is the curse of the city and all that sophistication implies.
Annie Dillard
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You have to take pains in a memoir not to hang on the reader's arm, like a drunk, and say, 'And then I did this and it was so interesting.
Annie Dillard
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Write about winter in the summer.
Annie Dillard
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When you write, you lay out a line of words. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory.
Annie Dillard
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Whenever there is stillness there is the still small voice, God's speaking from the whirlwind, nature's old song, and dance.
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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I work mornings only. I go out to lunch. Afternoons I play with the baby, walk with my husband, or shovel mail.
Annie Dillard