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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.

Annie Dillard

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Annie Dillard
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: April 30
Author
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Pittsburg
Pennsylvania
Annie Dillard Doak
Wood
Aim
Block
Woods
Past
Nothing
Chopping

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People who take photographs during their whole vacation won't remember their vacation. They'll only remember what photographs they took.
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The sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain. This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is.
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I can't dance anymore. Total knee replacements. I can't do anything anymore.
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Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?
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But enough is enough. One turns at last even from glory itself with a sigh of relief. From the depths of mystery, and even from the heights of splendor, we bounce back and hurry for the latitudes of home.
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Silence is not our heritage but our destiny we live where we want to live.
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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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Johnston's books are beautifully written and among the funniest I have ever read.
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The way we live our days, is the way we live our lives.
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I'm a housewife: I spend far more time on housework than anything else.
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By dipping us children in the Bible so often, they hoped, I think, to give our lives a serious tint, and to provide us with quaintly magnificent snatches of prayer to produce as charms while, say, being mugged for our cash or jewels.
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I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.
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Write about winter in the summer. Describe Norway as Ibsen did, from a desk in Italy describe Dublin as James Joyce did, from a desk in Paris. Willa Cather wrote her prairie novels in New York City Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn in Hartford, Connecticut. Recently, scholars learned that Walt Whitman rarely left his room.
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We are here to witness. There is nothing else to do with those mute materials we do not need. Until Larry teaches his stone to talk, until God changes his mind, or until the pagan gods slip back to their hilltop groves, all we can do with the whole inhuman array is watch it.
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You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then-and only then-it is handed to you.
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The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring.
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Adverbs are a sign that you've used the wrong verb.
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A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order - willed, faked, and so brought into being.
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When you write, you lay out a line of words. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory.
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