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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
Writer
Firsts
Book
Dwindles
First
Discovers
Every
Intrinsic
Impossibility
Excitement
Soon

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner's pick, a wood carver's gouge, a surgeon's probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year.
Annie Dillard
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I'm a housewife: I spend far more time on housework than anything else.
Annie Dillard
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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.
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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As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.
Annie Dillard
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She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.
Annie Dillard
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These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.
Annie Dillard
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Admire the world for never ending on you -- as you would an opponent, without taking your eyes away from him, or walking away.
Annie Dillard
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The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring.
Annie Dillard
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Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.
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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It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave.
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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The world is wider in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain and Lazarus.
Annie Dillard
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I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers.
Annie Dillard
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The point of going somewhere like the Napo River in Ecuador is not to see the most spectacular anything. It is simply to see what is there.
Annie Dillard
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if you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not.
Annie Dillard
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Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.
Annie Dillard
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It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping God may wake someday and take offense, or the waking God may draw us out to where we can never return.
Annie Dillard
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Who and of what import were the men whose bones bulk the Great Wall, the thirty million Mao starved, or the thirty million children not yet five who die each year now? Why, they are the insignificant others, of course living or dead, they are just some of the plentiful others...And you? To what end were we billions of oddballs born?
Annie Dillard