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You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then-and only then-it is handed to you.

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
Brain
Back
Heart
Handed
Search
Break

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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We are here on the planet only once, and might as well get a feel for the place.
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I think the dying pray at the last not please, but thank you, as a guest thanks his host at the door.
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The novel is a game or joke shared between author and reader.
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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.
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It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.
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Push it. examine all things intensely and relentlessly.
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Geography is the key, the crucial accident of birth. A piece of protein could be a snail, a sea lion, or a systems analyst, but it had to start somewhere. This is not science it is merely metaphor. And the landscape in which the protein starts shapes its end as surely as bowls shape water.
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I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers.
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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.
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You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it to the page. The page is jealous and tyrannical the page is made of time and matter the page always wins.
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Just think: in all the clean, beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a blot our planet alone has death.
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I'm a housewife: I spend far more time on housework than anything else.
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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.
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What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
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For writing a first draft requires from the writer a peculiar internal state which ordinary life does not induce. ... how to set yourself spinning?
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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.
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Our life seems cursed to be a wiggle merely, and a wandering without end.
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We wake, if ever at all, to mystery.
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Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.
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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