Annie Dillard - Book Quotes

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She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live. She read books as one would breathe ether, to sink in and die.

Annie Dillard
Private life, book life, took place where words met imagination without passing through the world.

Annie Dillard
I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as a dying friend. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.

Annie Dillard
It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale.

Annie Dillard
The dog opened one eye, cocked it at me, and rolled it up before her lids closed. People should not feed moralistic animals. If they're so holy, where are their books?

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

Annie Dillard
Out of a human population on earth of four and a half billion, perhaps twenty people can write a book in a year. Some people lift cars, too. Some people enter week-long sled-dog races, go over Niagara Falls in a barrel, fly planes through the Arc de Triomphe. Some people feel no pain in childbirth. Some people eat cars. There is no call to take human extremes as norms.

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
Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now.... Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.

Annie Dillard
What I sought in books was imagination. It was depth, depth of thought and feeling; some sort of extreme of subject matter; some nearness to death; some call to courage. I myself was getting wild; I wanted wildness, originality, genius, rapture, hope.... What I sought in books was a world whose surfaces, whose people and events and days lived, actually matched the exaltation of the interior life. There you could live.

Annie Dillard