A Quote by Annie Dillard

Write as if you were dying. — © Annie Dillard
Write as if you were dying.

Quote Topics

Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
We live in the least ugly time in history. If you look at back when Beethoven was writing, half the kids were dying, mothers were dying at childbirth, there were more wars going on then than there are now. People wrote the most beautiful things during the ugliest times.
That’s it?” Jason asked. “You spent an hour talking about how lucky you were to be dying?” No, not dying, Son. Living.
What is a country? A country is a piece of land surrounded on all sides by boundaries, usually unnatural. Englishmen are dying for England, Americans are dying for America, Germans are dying for Germany, Russians are dying for Russia. There are now fifty or sixty countries fighting in this war. Surely so many countries can't all be worth dying for.
What if this were Hell, this absence of sleep, this poet's desert, this pain of living, this dying of not dying, this anguish of shadows, this passion over death and light.
I write about what haunts me, and I write the books I myself am dying to read. I love it. I can't think of anything I'd rather do.
I think that were I in the middle of an obsession to write about, say, sudden oak death in California or my grandchildren or time and memory and how they look when you get to be in your sixties, and I thought, "Well, yes but people are dying every day in Baghdad," I wouldn't feel guilty about not writing about Baghdad if I didn't have any good ideas about how to write about it.
You have to write a book because you believe it has helped you, because you believe it has helped others personally and you are dying to share with it others because you know it will add value to their lives. You write it for them like a gift. You don't want anything from them. You don't want them to do anything for you. You don't even care if they all share the book with their friends, they don't all have to buy them. You're just dying to share this idea with people. Your challenge is to write it in a way that is compelling, enjoyable to read so that they will get the idea.
Dying, dying, someone told me just recently, dying is easy. Living is hard. for everyone.
Now majority rule is a precious, sacred thing worth dying for. But like other precious, sacred things .... it's not only worth dying for; it can make you wish you were dead. Imagine if all life were determined by majority rule. Every meal would be a pizza.
In days gone by, we were afraid of dying in dishonor or a state of sin. Nowadays, we are afraid of dying fools. Now the fact is that there is no Extreme Unction to absolve us of foolishness. We endure it here on earth as subjective eternity.
Dying before dying has two important consequences: It liberates the individual from the fear of death and influences the actual experience of dying at the time of biological demise.
Write as if you are dying.
I write about living, not dying.
Coming from where I came from, the Midwest, in the era I was born, the '30s, movies were glorious fun - Bette Davis dying or whatever. But whatever they were, they were not serious.
I had got this far, and was thinking of what to say next, and as my habit is, I was pricking the paper idly with my pen. And I thought how, between one dip of the pen and the next, time goes on, and I hurry, drive myself, and speed toward death. We are always dying. I while I write, you while you read, and others while they listen or stop their ears, they are all dying.
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