Quote

We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall.

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
Life
Useless
Private
Insensible
Sleep
Recall
Half
Recalls
Water
Mention
Lives
Waters
Live
Sleeping
Never
Waking

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What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
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Write about winter in the summer. Describe Norway as Ibsen did, from a desk in Italy describe Dublin as James Joyce did, from a desk in Paris. Willa Cather wrote her prairie novels in New York City Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn in Hartford, Connecticut. Recently, scholars learned that Walt Whitman rarely left his room.
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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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Nothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves.
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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?
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On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away.
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Silence is not our heritage but our destiny we live where we want to live.
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The more you read, the more you will write. The better the stuff you read, the better the stuff you will write.
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I wake expectant, hoping to see a new thing.
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The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.
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I saw in a blue haze all the world poured flat and pale between the mountains
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Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a word to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and delight, the canary that sings on the skull.
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The novel is a game or joke shared between author and reader.
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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.
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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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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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At night I read and write, and things I have never understood become clear I reap the harvest of the rest of the year's planting
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Time is the warp and matter the weft of the woven texture of beauty in space, and death is the hurling shuttle.
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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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Dan Gerber is one of our finest living poets.
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