Annie Dillard
Annie Dillard
Annie Dillardis an American author, best known for her narrative prose in both fiction and non-fiction. She has published works of poetry, essays, prose, and literary criticism, as well as two novels and one memoir. Her 1974 work Pilgrim at Tinker Creek won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Dillard taught for 21 years in the English department of Wesleyan University, in Middletown, Connecticut...
ProfessionNon-Fiction Author
Date of Birth30 April 1945
CityPittsburgh, PA
writing four pages
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.
light tree vision
I have since only rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam.
book firsts excitement
Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.
peaches
I couldn't unpeach the peaches.
tunnels faces mystery
Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf
children long age
There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable. There is no way you can tell the child that if language had been a melody, he had mastered it and done well, but that since it was in fact a sense, he had botched it utterly.
inspirational waking want
We still and always want waking.
inspirational moving knowing
Nothing on earth is more gladdening than knowing we must roll up our sleeves and move back the boundaries of the humanly possible once more.
nature eye water
Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don't affair. A fish flashes, then dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much salt. Deer apparently ascend bodily into heaven; the brightest oriole fades into leaves.
writing verbs used
Adverbs are a sign that you've used the wrong verb.
writing night years
At night I read and write, and things I have never understood become clear; I reap the harvest of the rest of the year's planting
writing stuff
The more you read, the more you will write. The better the stuff you read, the better the stuff you will write.
editors people musical
Learn punctuation; it is your little drum set, one of the few tools oyu have to signal the reader where the beats and emphases go. (If you get it wrong, any least thing, the editor will throw your manuscript out.) Punctuation is not like musical notation; it doesn't indicate the length of pauses, but instead signifies logical relations. There are all sorts of people out there who know these things very well. You have to be among them even to begin.
gratitude thinking doors
I think the dying pray at the last not "please," but "thank you," as a guest thanks his host at the door.