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

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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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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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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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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The point of going somewhere like the Napo River in Ecuador is not to see the most spectacular anything. It is simply to see what is there.
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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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Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand - that of finding workable compromises between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us.
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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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The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring.
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We are here on the planet only once, and might as well get a feel for the place.
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Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.
Annie Dillard
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Cruelty is a mystery, and a waste of pain.
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What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
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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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Novels written with film contracts in mind have a faint but unmistakable, and ruinous, odor.
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I know only enough of God to want to worship him, by any means ready to hand.
Annie Dillard
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Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?
Annie Dillard
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The universe that suckled us is a monster that does not care if we live or die--it does not care if it itself grinds to a halt. It is a beast running on chance and death, careening from nowhere to nowhere. It is fixed and blind, a robot programmed to kill. We are free and seeing we can only try to outwit it at every turn to save our lives.
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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.
Annie Dillard
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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.
Annie Dillard
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Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.
Annie Dillard