quotes from classic

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

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I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.

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Aim for the chopping block. If you aim for the wood, you will have nothing. Aim past the wood, aim through the wood; aim for the chopping block.

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Write about winter in the summer.

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The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.

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It's a little silly to finally learn how to write at this age. But I long ago realized I was secretly sincere.

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The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring. It is the sensation of a stunt pilot's turning barrel rolls, or an inchworm's blind rearing from a stem in search of a route. At its worst, it feels like alligator wrestling, at the level of the sentence.

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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.

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When I teach, I preach. I thump the Bible. I exhort my students morally. I talk to them about the dedicated life.

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

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Write as if you were dying.

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Just think: in all the clean, beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a blot; our planet alone has death.

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

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How can people think that artists seek a name? There is no such thing as an artist - only the world, lit or unlit, as the world allows.

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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.

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The Pulitzer is more useful than meaningful.

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

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I worked so hard all my life, and all I want to do now is read.

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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.

more quotes from Annie Dillard