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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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Annie Dillard
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: April 30
Author
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Pittsburg
Pennsylvania
Annie Dillard Doak
Always
Insularity
Pittsburgh
Guard
Town
Towns
Democratic
Cities
Open

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We are here to abet creation and to witness to it, to notice each other's beautiful face and complex nature so that creation need not play to an empty house.
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When you write, you lay out a line of words. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory.
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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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Unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous.
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I wake expectant, hoping to see a new thing.
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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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I feel as though I stand at the foot of an infinitely high staircase, down which some exuberant spirit is flinging tennis ball after tennis ball, eternally, and the one thing I want in the world is a tennis ball.
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The mind itself is an art object ... The mind is a blue guitar on which we improvise the song of the world.
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A schedule defends from chaos and whim. A net for catching days.
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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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Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?
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Whenever there is stillness there is the still small voice, God's speaking from the whirlwind, nature's old song, and dance.
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Write as if you are dying.
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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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Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you.
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Ecstasy, I think, is a soul's response to the waves holiness makes as it nears.
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Your feelings are none of your business.
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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.
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I'm a housewife: I spend far more time on housework than anything else.
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Old memories are very easy to get except that once you write about something you've destroyed it.
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