Quote

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.

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
Person
Subject
Discovers
Writing
Conversation
Proceed
Good
Subjects
Earthly
Writer
Encounter
Use
Regular
Happens
Encounters
Cannot
Whenever
Persons
Touch
Dismayed

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Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.
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No child on earth was ever meant to be ordinary, and you can see it in them, and they know it, too, but then the times get to them, and the wear out their brains learning what folks expect, and spend their strength trying to rise over those same folks.
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Writers serve as the memory of a people. They chew over our public past.
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We wake, if ever at all, to mystery.
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I break up through the skin of awareness a thousand times a day, as dolphins burst through seas, and dive again, and rise, and dive.
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I wake expectant, hoping to see a new thing.
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There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by.
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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.
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Our life seems cursed to be a wiggle merely, and a wandering without end.
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I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.
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It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.
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The mind itself is an art object ... The mind is a blue guitar on which we improvise the song of the world.
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Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation's short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit.
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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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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.
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We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence.
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Push it. examine all things intensely and relentlessly.
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I woke at intervals until . . . the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not.
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When I teach, I preach. I thump the Bible. I exhort my students morally. I talk to them about the dedicated life.
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How you spend your days is how you spend your life.
Annie Dillard