Quote

Crystals grew inside rock like arithmetic flowers. They lengthened and spread, added plane to plane in an awed and perfect obedience to an absolute geometry that even stones - maybe only the stones - understood.

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
Maybe
Spread
Geometry
Perfect
Stones
Plane
Fear
Rock
Added
Even
Rocks
Planes
Like
Flower
Obedience
Lengthened
Understood
Flowers
Awed
Inside
Absolutes
Arithmetic
Grew
Absolute
Crystals

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He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write. He is careful of what he learns, for that is what he will know.
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The novel is a game or joke shared between author and reader.
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I cannot imagine a sorrier pursuit than struggling for years to write a book that attempts to appeal to people who do not read in the first place.
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Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.
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If you're going to publish a book, you probably are going to make a fool of yourself.
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I wake expectant, hoping to see a new thing.
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Fiction keeps its audience by retaining the world as its subject matter. People like the world. Many people actually prefer it to art and spend their days by choice in the thick of it.
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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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Today is one of those excellent January partly cloudies in which light chooses an unexpected part of the landscape to trick out in gilt, and then the shadow sweeps it away. You know you're alive. You take huge steps, trying to feel the planet's roundness arc between your feet.
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Does anything eat flowers. I couldn't recall having seen anything eat a flower - are they nature's privileged pets?
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There must be bands of enthusiasts for everything on earth-fanatics who shared a vocabulary, a batch of technical skills and equipment, and, perhaps, a vision of some single slice of the beauty and mystery of things, of their complexity, fascination, and unexpectedness.
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There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.
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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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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.
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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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Almost all of my many passionate interests, and my many changes of mind, came through books. Books prompted the many vows I made to myself.
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I don't know what it is about fecundity that so appalls. I suppose it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonishingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful, and that with extravagance goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives.
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When I teach, I preach. I thump the Bible. I exhort my students morally. I talk to them about the dedicated life.
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You can't test courage cautiously, so I ran hard and waved my arms hard, happy.
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I couldn't unpeach the peaches.
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