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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.

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
Little
Surprise
Many
Writers
Real
Writer
Life
Rooms
World
Small
Recalling
Point
Colorless
Else
Deprivation
Littles
Sensory

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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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.
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No, the point is not only does time fly and do we die, but that in these reckless conditions we live at all, and are vouchsafed, for the duration of certain inexplicable moments, to know it.
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Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.
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You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it to the page. The page is jealous and tyrannical the page is made of time and matter the page always wins.
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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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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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We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all.
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The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.
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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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Who and of what import were the men whose bones bulk the Great Wall, the thirty million Mao starved, or the thirty million children not yet five who die each year now? Why, they are the insignificant others, of course living or dead, they are just some of the plentiful others...And you? To what end were we billions of oddballs born?
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I'm a housewife: I spend far more time on housework than anything else.
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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?
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Silence is not our heritage but our destiny we live where we want to live.
Annie Dillard
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Don't save something good for a later place. Don't hold back from your students, from the poor, don't try to keep anything for yourself 'cause it'll turn to ashes.
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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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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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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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The creatures I seek do not want to be seen.
Annie Dillard
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Our life seems cursed to be a wiggle merely, and a wandering without end.
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It could be that our faithlessness is a cowering cowardice born of our very smallness, a massive failure of imagination... If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldnt believe the world existed.
Annie Dillard