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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.

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
Ground
Obliterates
Writers
Painters
Painting
Latest
Hand
Chapters
Left
Earlier
Hands
Version
Right
Versions
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Painter

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest.
Annie Dillard
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Books swept me away, this way and that, one after the other I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them.
Annie Dillard
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Adverbs are a sign that you've used the wrong verb.
Annie Dillard
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People who read are not too lazy to turn on the television they prefer books.
Annie Dillard
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He judged the instant and let go he flung himself loose into the stars.
Annie Dillard
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There is no whit less enlightenment under the tree by your street than there was under the Buddha's bo tree. I invite you to go sit under that tree by your street.
Annie Dillard
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Then why did you tell me?
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.
Annie Dillard
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I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as a dying friend. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.
Annie Dillard
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Like everyone in his right mind, I feared Santa Claus.
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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You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you hear it: There is nothing there...You feel the world's word as a tension, a hum, a single chorused note everywhere the same. This is it: This hum is the silence.
Annie Dillard
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Those of us who read carried around with us like martyrs a secret knowledge, a secret joy, and a secret hope: There is a life worth living where history is still taking place there are ideas worth dying for, and circumstances where courage is still prized.
Annie Dillard
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For writing a first draft requires from the writer a peculiar internal state which ordinary life does not induce. ... how to set yourself spinning?
Annie Dillard
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The sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain. This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is.
Annie Dillard
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I know only enough of God to want to worship him, by any means ready to hand.
Annie Dillard
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If we listened to our intellect, we’d never have a love affair... or go into business. You’ve got to jump off cliffs and build your wings on the way down.
Annie Dillard
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It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as separating us from our creator, our very self-consciousness, is also the one thing that divides us from our fellow creatures. It was a bitter birthday present from evolution.
Annie Dillard
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When I walk with a camera, I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment's light prints on my own silver gut. When I see this second way I am above all an unscrupulous observer.
Annie Dillard
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The reader's ear must adjust down from loud life to the subtle, imaginary sounds of the written word. An ordinary reader picking up a book can't yet hear a thing it will take half an hour to pick up the writing's modulations, its ups and downs and louds and softs.
Annie Dillard