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The creatures I seek do not want to be seen.

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
Seek
Creatures
Seen

More quotes by 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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The reader's ear must adjust down from loud life to the subtle, imaginary sounds of the written word. An ordinary reader picking up a book can't yet hear a thing it will take half an hour to pick up the writing's modulations, its ups and downs and louds and softs.
Annie Dillard
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You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it... The vision is not so much destroyed, exactly, as it is, by the time you have finished, forgotten. It has been replaced by this changeling.
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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Skin was earth it was soil. I could see, even on my own skin, the joined trapezoids of dust specks God had wetted and stuck with his spit the morning he made Adam from dirt. Now, all these generations later, we people could still see on our skin the inherited prints of the dust specks of Eden.
Annie Dillard
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I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.
Annie Dillard
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Let the grass die. I let almost all of my indoor plants die from neglect while I was writing the book. There are all kinds of ways to live. You can take your choice. You can keep a tidy house, and when St. Peter asks you what you did with your life, you can say, I kept a tidy house, I made my own cheese balls.
Annie Dillard
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Novels written with film contracts in mind have a faint but unmistakable, and ruinous, odor.
Annie Dillard
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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.
Annie Dillard
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Your freedom as a writer is not freedom of expression in the sense of wild blurting you may not let rip. It is life at its most free, if you are fortunate enough to be able to try it, because you select your materials, invent your task, and pace yourself.
Annie Dillard
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Don't save something good for a later place. Don't hold back from your students, from the poor, don't try to keep anything for yourself 'cause it'll turn to ashes.
Annie Dillard
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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.
Annie Dillard
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Whenever an encounter between a writer of good will and a regular person of good will happens to touch on the subject of writing, each person discovers, dismayed, that good will is of no earthly use. The conversation cannot proceed.
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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I write in my own journal when something extraordinary or funny happens. And there's some nice imagery in there. I don't think of what to do with it.
Annie Dillard
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As a life's work, I would remember everything - everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net.
Annie Dillard
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Old memories are very easy to get except that once you write about something you've destroyed it.
Annie Dillard
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No one escapes the wilderness on the way to the promised land.
Annie Dillard
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What is a house but a bigger skin, and a neighborhood map but the world's skin ever expanding?
Annie Dillard
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The creative process obtains in all creative acts. So if I'm painting suddenly I'll see something that I didn't see before.
Annie Dillard