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The Pulitzer is more useful than meaningful.

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
Pulitzer
Useful
Meaningful

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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Nothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves.
Annie Dillard
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Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don't affair. A fish flashes, then dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much salt. Deer apparently ascend bodily into heaven the brightest oriole fades into leaves.
Annie Dillard
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There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been.
Annie Dillard
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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.
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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You can't test courage cautiously, so I ran hard and waved my arms hard, happy.
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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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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What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.
Annie Dillard
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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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Fiction keeps its audience by retaining the world as its subject matter. People like the world. Many people actually prefer it to art and spend their days by choice in the thick of it.
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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We wake, if ever at all, to mystery.
Annie Dillard
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It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.
Annie Dillard
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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.
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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Push it. examine all things intensely and relentlessly.
Annie Dillard
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Just once I wanted a task that required all the joy I had. Day after day I had noticed that if I waited long enough, my strong unexpressed joy would dwindle and dissipate inside me, like a fire subsiding . . . . Just this once I wanted to let it rip.
Annie Dillard
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We are here on the planet only once, and might as well get a feel for the place.
Annie Dillard
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Time is the continuous loop, the snakeskin with scales endlessly overlapping without beginning or end, or time is an ascending spiral if you will, like a child's toy Slinky.
Annie Dillard