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The interior life is often stupid.

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
Interior
Interiors
Stupid
Often
Life

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A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.
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Are you living just a little and calling that life?
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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.
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Doing something does not require discipline. It creates its own discipline - with a little help from caffeine.
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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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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 It has been replaced by this changeling.
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By dipping us children in the Bible so often, they hoped, I think, to give our lives a serious tint, and to provide us with quaintly magnificent snatches of prayer to produce as charms while, say, being mugged for our cash or jewels.
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Does anything eat flowers. I couldn't recall having seen anything eat a flower - are they nature's privileged pets?
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She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.
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The real and proper question is: why is it beautiful?
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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.
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I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.
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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.
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We are here to witness. There is nothing else to do with those mute materials we do not need. Until Larry teaches his stone to talk, until God changes his mind, or until the pagan gods slip back to their hilltop groves, all we can do with the whole inhuman array is watch it.
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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.
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For all the insularity of the old guard, Pittsburgh was always an open and democratic town.
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As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.
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I'd seen a great many partial eclipses, but a partial eclipse has the same relation to a total eclipse as flirting with a man does to marrying him. It's completely different.
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When I teach, I preach. I thump the Bible. I exhort my students morally. I talk to them about the dedicated life.
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Dan Gerber is one of our finest living poets.
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