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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Annie Dillard

Image
The irrational haunts the metaphysical.
Annie Dillard
Image
The creatures I seek do not want to be seen.
Annie Dillard
Image
It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave.
Annie Dillard
Image
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.
Annie Dillard
Image
The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest.
Annie Dillard
Image
Like any child, I slid into myself perfectly fitted, as a diver meets her reflection in a pool. Her fingertips enter the fingertips on the water, her wrists slide up her arms. The diver wraps herself in her reflection wholly, sealing it at the toes, and wears it as she climbs rising from the pool, and ever after.
Annie Dillard
Image
The mind wants the world to return its love, or its awareness the mind wants to know all the world, and all eternity, and God.
Annie Dillard
Image
The world is wider in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain and Lazarus.
Annie Dillard
Image
I would like to live. . . open to time and death painlessly, noticing everything, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will.
Annie Dillard
Image
poetry has been able to function quite directly as human interpretation of the raw, loose universe. It is a mixture, if you will, of journalism and metaphysics, or of science and religion.
Annie Dillard
Image
The surest sign of age is loneliness.
Annie Dillard
Image
The way to learn about a writer is to read the text. Or texts.
Annie Dillard
Image
She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.
Annie Dillard
Image
Could two live that way? Could two live under the wild rose, and explore by the pond, so that the smooth mind of each is as everywhere present to the other, and as received and as unchallenged, as falling snow?
Annie Dillard
Image
What have we been doing all these centuries but trying to call God back to the mountain, or, failing that, raise a peep out of anything that isn't us? What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are not they both saying: Hello? We spy on whales and on interstellar radio objects we starve ourselves and pray till we're blue.
Annie Dillard
Image
Experiencing the present purely is being empty and hollow you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.
Annie Dillard
Image
Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we sense them.
Annie Dillard
Image
As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.
Annie Dillard
Image
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.
Annie Dillard
Image
The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.
Annie Dillard