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
mind doe would-be
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.
years waking would-be
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.
book writing long
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.
christmas mind santa
Like everyone in his right mind, I feared Santa Claus.
children surprise wonder
Young children have no sense of wonder. They bewilder well, but few things surprise them. All of it is new to young children, after all, and equally gratuitous.
mother father crowds
Our family was on the lunatic fringe. My mother was always completely irrepressible. My father made crowd noises into a microphone.
book fool ifs
If you're going to publish a book, you probably are going to make a fool of yourself.
spirit innocence moments
What I call innocence is the spirit's unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once a receptiveness and total concentration.
space landscape moments
Landscape consists in the multiple, overlapping intricacies and forms that exist in a given space at a moment in time.
talent draws
God gave me a talent to draw. I 'owed' it to him to develop the talent.
mind odor film
Novels written with film contracts in mind have a faint but unmistakable, and ruinous, odor.
time children ascending
Time is the continuous loop, the snakeskin with scales endlessly overlapping without beginning or end, or time is an ascending spiral if you will, like a child's toy Slinky.
mixtures able journalism
poetry has been able to function quite directly as human interpretation of the raw, loose universe. It is a mixture, if you will, of journalism and metaphysics, or of science and religion.
library special world
It would seem that emotions are the curse, not death-emotions that appear to have developed upon a few freaks as a special curse from Malevolence. All right then. It is our emotions that are amiss. We are freaks, the world is fine, and let us all go have lobotomies to restore us to a natural state. We can leave the library then, go back to the creek lobotomized, and live on its banks as untroubled as any muskrat or reed. You first.