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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
Matter
Choice
Many
Spend
Like
Fiction
Retaining
World
Days
Thick
People
Choices
Prefer
Audience
Keeps
Actually
Subject
Art
Subjects

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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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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A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.
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It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.
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Today is one of those excellent January partly cloudies in which light chooses an unexpected part of the landscape to trick out in gilt, and then the shadow sweeps it away. You know you're alive. You take huge steps, trying to feel the planet's roundness arc between your feet.
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I break up through the skin of awareness a thousand times a day, as dolphins burst through seas, and dive again, and rise, and dive.
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It's a little silly to finally learn how to write at this age. But I long ago realized I was secretly sincere.
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It should surprise no one that the life of the writer - such as it is - is colorless to the point of sensory deprivation. Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.
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The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.
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At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it.
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Every spring he vowed to quit teaching school, and every summer he missed his pupils and searched for them on the streets.
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According to Inuit culture in Greenland, a person possesses six or seven souls. The souls take the form of tiny people scattered throughout the body.
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I noticed this process of waking, and predicted with terrifying logic that one of these years not far away I would be awake continuously and never slip back, and never be free of myself again.
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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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It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave.
Annie Dillard
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The painter... does not fit the paints to the world. He most certainly does not fit the world to himself. He fits himself to the paint. The self is the servant who bears the paintbox and its inherited contents.
Annie Dillard
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You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it.
Annie Dillard
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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.
Annie Dillard
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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.
Annie Dillard
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One of the few things I know about writing is this: Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book, give it, give it all, give it now.
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Trees have a curious relationship to the subject of the present moment. There are many created things in the universe that outlive us, that outlive the sun, even, but I can't think about them. I live with trees.
Annie Dillard