Living by Fiction Quotes

“You can, in short, lead the life of the mind, which is, despite some appalling frustrations, the happiest life on earth. And one day, in the thick of this, approaching some partial vision, you will (I swear) find yourself on the receiving end of - of all things - an "idea for a story," and you will, God save you, start thinking about writing some fiction of your own. Then you will understand, in what I fancy might be a blinding flash, that all this passionate thinking is what fiction is about, that all those other fiction writers started as you did, and are laborers in the same vineyard.”
― Annie Dillard, Living by Fiction: A Classic Work of Literary Criticism on Contemporary and Traditional Fiction for Literature Lovers

“As symbol, or as the structuring of symbols, art can render intelligible -- or at least visible, at least discussible -- those wilderness regions which philosophy has abandoned and those hazardous terrains where science's tools do not fit. I mean the rim of knowledge where language falters; and I mean all those areas of human experience, feeling, and thought about which we care so much and know so little: the meaning of all we see before us, of our love for each other, and the forms of freedom in time, and power, and destiny, and all whereof we imagine: grace, perfection, beauty, and the passage of all materials to thoughts, and of all ideas to forms.”
― Annie Dillard, Living by Fiction: A Classic Work of Literary Criticism on Contemporary and Traditional Fiction for Literature Lovers

“Our interpreting the universe as an artifact absolutely requires that we posit an author for it, or a celestial fimmaker, dramatist, painter, sculptor, composer, architect, or choreographer. And no one has been willing openly to posit such an artist for the universe since the American transcedentalists and before them the Medieval European philosophers.”
― Annie Dillard, Living by Fiction: A Classic Work of Literary Criticism on Contemporary and Traditional Fiction for Literature Lovers

“The mind fits the world and shapes it as a river fits and shapes its own banks.”
― Annie Dillard, Living by Fiction: A Classic Work of Literary Criticism on Contemporary and Traditional Fiction for Literature Lovers

“Fiction can deal with all the world’s objects and ideas together, with the breadth of human experience in time and space; it can deal with things the limited disciplines of thought either ignore completely or destroy by methodological caution, our most pressing concerns: personality, family, death, love, time, spirit, goodness, evil, destiny, beauty, will.”
― Annie Dillard, Living by Fiction: A Classic Work of Literary Criticism on Contemporary and Traditional Fiction for Literature Lovers

“You can, in short, lead the life of the mind, which is, despite some appalling frustrations, the happiest life on earth. And one day, in the thick of this, approaching some partial vision, you will (I swear) find yourself on the receiving end of—of all things—an “idea for a story,” and you will, God save you, start thinking about writing some fiction of your own. Then you will understand, in what I fancy might be a blinding flash, that all this passionate thinking is what fiction is about, that all those other fiction writers started as you did, and are laborers in the same vineyard.”
― Annie Dillard, Living by Fiction: A Classic Work of Literary Criticism on Contemporary and Traditional Fiction for Literature Lovers

“This is a fundamentally insane notion, which developed in my own mind from an idea of Buckminster Fuller's. Every so often I try to encourage other writers by telling them this cheerful set of thoughts; always they gaze at me absolutely appalled. Fuller's assertion was roughly to this affect: the purpose of people on earth is to counteract the tide of entropy described in the Second Law of Thermodynamics.”
― Annie Dillard, Living by Fiction: A Classic Work of Literary Criticism on Contemporary and Traditional Fiction for Literature Lovers

“Bad poetry is almost always bad because it attempts to claim for itself the real power of whatever it describes in ten lines: a sky full of stars, first love, or Niagara Falls.”
― Annie Dillard, Living by Fiction: A Classic Work of Literary Criticism on Contemporary and Traditional Fiction for Literature Lovers

“I think science works the way a tightrope walker works: by not looking at its feet. As soon as it looks at its feet, it realizes its operating in midair.”
― Annie Dillard, Living by Fiction: A Classic Work of Literary Criticism on Contemporary and Traditional Fiction for Literature Lovers