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
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.
hands painting chapters
Painters work from the ground up. The latest version of a painting overlays earlier versions, and obliterates them. Writers, on the other hand, work from left to right. The discardable chapters are on the left.
people body shapes
The body of literature, with its limits and edges, exists outside some people and inside others. Only after the writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature.
baby morning husband
I work mornings only. I go out to lunch. Afternoons I play with the baby, walk with my husband, or shovel mail.
metaphysical irrational
The irrational haunts the metaphysical.
summer spring teaching
Every spring he vowed to quit teaching school, and every summer he missed his pupils and searched for them on the streets.
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.
cities self consciousness
Self-consciousness is the curse of the city and all that sophistication implies.
mind odor film
Novels written with film contracts in mind have a faint but unmistakable, and ruinous, odor.
reading light sight
When I walk with a camera, I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment's light prints on my own silver gut. When I see this second way I am above all an unscrupulous observer.
mind world want
The mind wants the world to return its love, or its awareness; the mind wants to know all the world, and all eternity, and God.
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.
baby children book
Writing a book is like rearing children -- willpower has very little to do with it. If you have a little baby crying in the middle of the night, and if you depend only on willpower to get you out of bed to feed the baby, that baby will starve. You do it out of love.