Quote

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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Annie Dillard
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: April 30
Author
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Pittsburg
Pennsylvania
Annie Dillard Doak
People
Choices
Prefer
Audience
Keeps
Actually
Subject
Art
Subjects
Matter
Choice
Many
Spend
Like
Fiction
Retaining
World
Days
Thick

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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.
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The life of sensation is the life of greed it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less.
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Divinity is not playful. The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensibl e earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and fleet. There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see.
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The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.
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You have to take pains in a memoir not to hang on the reader's arm, like a drunk, and say, 'And then I did this and it was so interesting.
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All my books started out as extravagant and ended up pure and plain.
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Are you living just a little and calling that life?
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Self-consciousness is the curse of the city and all that sophistication implies.
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These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.
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You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then-and only then-it is handed to you.
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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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Admire the world for never ending on you -- as you would an opponent, without taking your eyes away from him, or walking away.
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I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers.
Annie Dillard
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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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What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.
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I think the dying pray at the last not please, but thank you, as a guest thanks his host at the door.
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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.
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You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you hear it: There is nothing there...You feel the world's word as a tension, a hum, a single chorused note everywhere the same. This is it: This hum is the silence.
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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.
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The interior life is often stupid.
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