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

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The interior life is often stupid.
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Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
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I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers.
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Admire the world for never ending on you -- as you would an opponent, without taking your eyes away from him, or walking away.
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poetry has been able to function quite directly as human interpretation of the raw, loose universe. It is a mixture, if you will, of journalism and metaphysics, or of science and religion.
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Unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous.
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When I first read the words 'introvert' and 'extrovert' when I was 10, I thought I was both.
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Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.
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I saw in a blue haze all the world poured flat and pale between the mountains
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Doing something does not require discipline. It creates its own discipline - with a little help from caffeine.
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Nature's silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block.
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The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring.
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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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She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.
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The way we live our days, is the way we live our lives.
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I'd seen a great many partial eclipses, but a partial eclipse has the same relation to a total eclipse as flirting with a man does to marrying him. It's completely different.
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Painters work from the ground up. The latest version of a painting overlays earlier versions, and obliterates them. Writers, on the other hand, work from left to right. The discardable chapters are on the left.
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At night I read and write, and things I have never understood become clear I reap the harvest of the rest of the year's planting
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The point of going somewhere like the Napo River in Ecuador is not to see the most spectacular anything. It is simply to see what is there.
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What is a house but a bigger skin, and a neighborhood map but the world's skin ever expanding?
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