Annie Dillard Quotes

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Annie Dillard

Profession : Author

Birth : April 30, 1945

I never met a man who was shaken by a field of identical blades of grass. An acre of poppies and a forest of spruce boggle no one's mind.

Annie Dillard

As a life's work, I would remember everything - everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net.

Annie Dillard

The painter... does not fit the paints to the world. He most certainly does not fit the world to himself. He fits himself to the paint. The self is the servant who bears the paintbox and its inherited contents.

Annie Dillard

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.

Annie Dillard

Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.

Annie Dillard

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.

Annie Dillard

I can't dance anymore. Total knee replacements. I can't do anything anymore.

Annie Dillard

All my books started out as extravagant and ended up pure and plain.

Annie Dillard

If you're going to publish a book, you probably are going to make a fool of yourself.

Annie Dillard

I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again.

Annie Dillard

The writer studies literature, not the world.

Annie Dillard

The writer studies literature, not the world. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write.

Annie Dillard