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Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.

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
Desk
Desks
Cranking
Engines
Midair
Keeps
Spin
Belief
Gears
Turns
Belt
Keep
Belts
Work
Engine

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The way to learn about a writer is to read the text. Or texts.
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The Pulitzer is more useful than meaningful.
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Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a word to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and delight, the canary that sings on the skull.
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Like any child, I slid into myself perfectly fitted, as a diver meets her reflection in a pool. Her fingertips enter the fingertips on the water, her wrists slide up her arms. The diver wraps herself in her reflection wholly, sealing it at the toes, and wears it as she climbs rising from the pool, and ever after.
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If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed.
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I saw in a blue haze all the world poured flat and pale between the mountains
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We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet.
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Novels written with film contracts in mind have a faint but unmistakable, and ruinous, odor.
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People who read are not too lazy to turn on the television they prefer books.
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I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers.
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I wake expectant, hoping to see a new thing.
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I woke at intervals until . . . the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not.
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I think the dying pray at the last not please, but thank you, as a guest thanks his host at the door.
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Time is the warp and matter the weft of the woven texture of beauty in space, and death is the hurling shuttle.
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The way we live our days, is the way we live our lives.
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A schedule defends from chaos and whim. A net for catching days.
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Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don't affair. A fish flashes, then dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much salt. Deer apparently ascend bodily into heaven the brightest oriole fades into leaves.
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Our life seems cursed to be a wiggle merely, and a wandering without end.
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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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The real and proper question is: why is it beautiful?
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