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

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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I alternate between thinking of the planet as home - dear and familiar stone hearth and garden - and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners.
Annie Dillard
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How you spend your days is how you spend your life.
Annie Dillard
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People who take photographs during their whole vacation won't remember their vacation. They'll only remember what photographs they took.
Annie Dillard
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He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write. He is careful of what he learns, for that is what he will know.
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I know only enough of God to want to worship him, by any means ready to hand.
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I can't dance anymore. Total knee replacements. I can't do anything anymore.
Annie Dillard
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Time is the continuous loop, the snakeskin with scales endlessly overlapping without beginning or end, or time is an ascending spiral if you will, like a child's toy Slinky.
Annie Dillard
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The courage of children and beasts is a function of innocence.
Annie Dillard
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There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been.
Annie Dillard
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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
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But enough is enough. One turns at last even from glory itself with a sigh of relief. From the depths of mystery, and even from the heights of splendor, we bounce back and hurry for the latitudes of home.
Annie Dillard
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Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don't affair. A fish flashes, then dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much salt. Deer apparently ascend bodily into heaven the brightest oriole fades into leaves.
Annie Dillard
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The way we live our days, is the way we live our lives.
Annie Dillard
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I'm a housewife: I spend far more time on housework than anything else.
Annie Dillard
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Aim for the chopping block. If you aim for the wood, you will have nothing. Aim past the wood, aim through the wood aim for the chopping block.
Annie Dillard
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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
Annie Dillard
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It makes more sense to write one big book - a novel or nonfiction narrative - than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all you possess and learn.
Annie Dillard
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The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring.
Annie Dillard
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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
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Just once I wanted a task that required all the joy I had. Day after day I had noticed that if I waited long enough, my strong unexpressed joy would dwindle and dissipate inside me, like a fire subsiding . . . . Just this once I wanted to let it rip.
Annie Dillard