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

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It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale.
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The world is wider in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain and Lazarus.
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As a life's work, I would remember everything - everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net.
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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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How can people think that artists seek a name? A name, like a face, is something you have when you're not alone. There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world, lit or unlit as the light allows.
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You do what you do out of your private love of the thing itself.
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The creative process obtains in all creative acts. So if I'm painting suddenly I'll see something that I didn't see before.
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The reader's ear must adjust down from loud life to the subtle, imaginary sounds of the written word. An ordinary reader picking up a book can't yet hear a thing it will take half an hour to pick up the writing's modulations, its ups and downs and louds and softs.
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What have we been doing all these centuries but trying to call God back to the mountain, or, failing that, raise a peep out of anything that isn't us? What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are not they both saying: Hello? We spy on whales and on interstellar radio objects we starve ourselves and pray till we're blue.
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We wake, if ever at all, to mystery.
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Push it. examine all things intensely and relentlessly.
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The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper I cannot quite make it out.
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Trees have a curious relationship to the subject of the present moment. There are many created things in the universe that outlive us, that outlive the sun, even, but I can't think about them. I live with trees.
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Write as if you are dying.
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You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it.
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All my books started out as extravagant and ended up pure and plain.
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The mind wants the world to return its love, or its awareness the mind wants to know all the world, and all eternity, and God.
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I wake expectant, hoping to see a new thing.
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What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
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The irrational haunts the metaphysical.
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