Quote

Writing a book is like rearing children -- willpower has very little to do with it. If you have a little baby crying in the middle of the night, and if you depend only on willpower to get you out of bed to feed the baby, that baby will starve. You do it out of love.

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
Depend
Book
Bed
Children
Cry
Writing
Depends
Rearing
Love
Baby
Starve
Like
Middle
Willpower
Night
Crying
Littles
Feed

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On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away.
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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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Dan Gerber is one of our finest living poets.
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What I call innocence is the spirit's unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once a receptiveness and total concentration.
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The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest.
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When you write, you lay out a line of words. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory.
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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.
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Push it. examine all things intensely and relentlessly.
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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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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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Skin was earth it was soil. I could see, even on my own skin, the joined trapezoids of dust specks God had wetted and stuck with his spit the morning he made Adam from dirt. Now, all these generations later, we people could still see on our skin the inherited prints of the dust specks of Eden.
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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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Just think: in all the clean, beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a blot our planet alone has death.
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What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
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[Insects] are not only cold-blooded, and green- and yellow-blooded, but are also cased in a clacking horn. They have rigid eyes and brains strung down their backs. But they make up the bulk of our comrades-at-life, so I look to them for a glimmer of companionship.
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I saw in a blue haze all the world poured flat and pale between the mountains
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She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.
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I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too.
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Experiencing the present purely is being empty and hollow you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.
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Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.
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