Quote

The creative process obtains in all creative acts. So if I'm painting suddenly I'll see something that I didn't see before.

Annie Dillard

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Annie Dillard
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: April 30
Author
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Pittsburg
Pennsylvania
Annie Dillard Doak
Creative
Process
Didn
Something
Obtains
Acts
Suddenly
Painting

More quotes by Annie Dillard

Image
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.
Annie Dillard
Image
poetry has been able to function quite directly as human interpretation of the raw, loose universe. It is a mixture, if you will, of journalism and metaphysics, or of science and religion.
Annie Dillard
Image
Nothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves.
Annie Dillard
Image
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.
Annie Dillard
Image
The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper I cannot quite make it out.
Annie Dillard
Image
Nature's silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block.
Annie Dillard
Image
The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring.
Annie Dillard
Image
People who read are not too lazy to turn on the television they prefer books.
Annie Dillard
Image
The interior life is often stupid.
Annie Dillard
Image
The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.
Annie Dillard
Image
As a life's work, I would remember everything - everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net.
Annie Dillard
Image
The mind itself is an art object. It is a Mondrian canvas onto whose homemade grids it fits its own preselected products. Our knowledge is contextual and only contextual. Ordering and invention coincide: we call their collaboration knowledge.
Annie Dillard
Image
When I teach, I preach. I thump the Bible. I exhort my students morally. I talk to them about the dedicated life.
Annie Dillard
Image
Are you living just a little and calling that life?
Annie Dillard
Image
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
Image
Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand - that of finding workable compromises between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us.
Annie Dillard
Image
What have we been doing all these centuries but trying to call God back to the mountain, or, failing that, raise a peep out of anything that isn't us? What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are not they both saying: Hello? We spy on whales and on interstellar radio objects we starve ourselves and pray till we're blue.
Annie Dillard
Image
Write about winter in the summer. Describe Norway as Ibsen did, from a desk in Italy describe Dublin as James Joyce did, from a desk in Paris. Willa Cather wrote her prairie novels in New York City Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn in Hartford, Connecticut. Recently, scholars learned that Walt Whitman rarely left his room.
Annie Dillard
Image
The world is wider in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain and Lazarus.
Annie Dillard
Image
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.
Annie Dillard