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

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There is neither a proportional relationship, nor an inverse one, between a writer’s estimation of a work in progress & its actual quality. The feeling that the work is magnificent, & the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged.
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The life of sensation is the life of greed it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less.
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Johnston's books are beautifully written and among the funniest I have ever read.
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Are you living just a little and calling that life?
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Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.
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What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
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The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest.
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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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Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?
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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.
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It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave.
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Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.
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.
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I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers.
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Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.
Annie Dillard
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I write in my own journal when something extraordinary or funny happens. And there's some nice imagery in there. I don't think of what to do with it.
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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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Silence is not our heritage but our destiny we live where we want to live.
Annie Dillard
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The Pulitzer is more useful than meaningful.
Annie Dillard
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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.
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