39 Quotes by Annie Dillard about Writing
- Author Annie Dillard
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At night on land migrating monarchs slumber on certain trees, hung in festoons with wings folded together, thick on the trees and shaggy as bearskin. [p. 244]
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- Author Annie Dillard
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You can read in the space of a coffin, and you can write in the space of a toolshed meant for mowers and spades.
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- Author Annie Dillard
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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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- Author Annie Dillard
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I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend. During visiting hours, I enter its room with dread and sympathy for its many disorders. I hold its hand and hope it will get better. This tender relationship can change in a twinkling. If you skip a visit or two, a work in progress will turn on you.
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- Author Annie Dillard
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The feeling that the work is magnificent, and the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged.
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- Author Annie Dillard
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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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- Author Annie Dillard
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In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers said "It is the trade entering his body.
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- Author Annie Dillard
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The physicality of storytelling must remain strong.
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- Author Annie Dillard
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The line of words feels for cracks in the firmament.
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