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Annie Dillard
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Annie Dillard
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: April 30
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Essayist
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University Teacher
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Pittsburg
Pennsylvania
Annie Dillard Doak
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More quotes by Annie Dillard
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?
Annie Dillard
There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world lit or unlit as the light allows. When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it?
Annie Dillard
It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave. It is hard to desecrate a grove and change your mind. The very holy mountains are keeping mum. We doused the burning bush and cannot rekindle it we are lighting matches in vain under every green tree.
Annie Dillard
There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.
Annie Dillard
Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?
Annie Dillard
As a life's work, I would remember everything - everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net.
Annie Dillard
Dan Gerber is one of our finest living poets.
Annie Dillard
We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us.
Annie Dillard
[Insects] are not only cold-blooded, and green- and yellow-blooded, but are also cased in a clacking horn. They have rigid eyes and brains strung down their backs. But they make up the bulk of our comrades-at-life, so I look to them for a glimmer of companionship.
Annie Dillard
Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.
Annie Dillard
The way we live our days, is the way we live our lives.
Annie Dillard
Just think: in all the clean, beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a blot our planet alone has death.
Annie Dillard
Every spring he vowed to quit teaching school, and every summer he missed his pupils and searched for them on the streets.
Annie Dillard
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
if you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not.
Annie Dillard
I don't know what it is about fecundity that so appalls. I suppose it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonishingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful, and that with extravagance goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives.
Annie Dillard
What is important is the moment of opening a life and feeling it touch--with an electric hiss and cry--this speckled mineral sphere, our present world.
Annie Dillard
Your freedom as a writer is not freedom of expression in the sense of wild blurting you may not let rip. It is life at its most free, if you are fortunate enough to be able to try it, because you select your materials, invent your task, and pace yourself.
Annie Dillard
Does anything eat flowers. I couldn't recall having seen anything eat a flower - are they nature's privileged pets?
Annie Dillard
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.
Annie Dillard