quotes from classic

You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it to the page. The page is jealous and tyrannical; the page is made of time and matter; the page always wins.

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Crystals grew inside rock like arithmetic flowers. They lengthened and spread, added plane to plane in an awed and perfect obedience to an absolute geometry that even stones - maybe only the stones - understood.

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According to Inuit culture in Greenland, a person possesses six or seven souls. The souls take the form of tiny people scattered throughout the body.

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When I first read the words 'introvert' and 'extrovert' when I was 10, I thought I was both.

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God gave me a talent to draw. I 'owed' it to him to develop the talent.

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Our family was on the lunatic fringe. My mother was always completely irrepressible. My father made crowd noises into a microphone.

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People love pretty much the same things best. A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.

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I'm a housewife: I spend far more time on housework than anything else.

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

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The writer studies literature, not the world.

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The mind of the writer does indeed do something before it dies, and so does its owner, but I would be hard put to call it living.

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I noticed this process of waking, and predicted with terrifying logic that one of these years not far away I would be awake continuously and never slip back, and never be free of myself again.

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Matters of taste are not, it turns out, moral issues.

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At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it.

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There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by.

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The notion of the infinite variety of detail and the multiplicity of forms is a pleasing one; in complexity are the fringes of beauty, and in variety are generosity and exuberance.

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'Fecundity' is an ugly word for an ugly subject. It is ugly, at least, in the eggy animal world. I don't think it is for plants.

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Buddhism notes that it is always a mistake to think your soul can go it alone.

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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.

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There is no such thing as an artist - only the world, lit or unlit, as the world allows.

more quotes from Annie Dillard