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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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If I actually believed that the progress of human understanding depended on our crop of contemporary novelists, I would shoot myself.
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Every spring he vowed to quit teaching school, and every summer he missed his pupils and searched for them on the streets.
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At a certain point, you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening.
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He judged the instant and let go he flung himself loose into the stars.
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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.
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People who read are not too lazy to turn on the television they prefer books.
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Almost all of my many passionate interests, and my many changes of mind, came through books. Books prompted the many vows I made to myself.
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The life of sensation is the life of greed it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less.
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The real and proper question is: why is it beautiful?
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When I walk with a camera, I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment's light prints on my own silver gut. When I see this second way I am above all an unscrupulous observer.
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What is a house but a bigger skin, and a neighborhood map but the world's skin ever expanding?
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I woke at intervals until . . . the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not.
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Buddhism notes that it is always a mistake to think your soul can go it alone.
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The creatures I seek do not want to be seen.
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It makes more sense to write one big book - a novel or nonfiction narrative - than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all you possess and learn.
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The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.
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It's a little silly to finally learn how to write at this age. But I long ago realized I was secretly sincere.
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Landscape consists in the multiple, overlapping intricacies and forms that exist in a given space at a moment in time.
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I had good innings, as the British say. I wrote for 38 years at the top of my form, and I wanted to quit on a high note.
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It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale.
Annie Dillard