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Our family was on the lunatic fringe. My mother was always completely irrepressible. My father made crowd noises into a microphone.

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
Completely
Noises
Family
Microphone
Father
Microphones
Mother
Fringe
Made
Lunatic
Always
Crowd
Crowds
Noise
Irrepressible

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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.
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About five years ago I saw a mockingbird make a straight vertical descent from the roof gutter of a four-story building. It was an act as careless and spontaneous as the curl of a stem or the kindling of a star.
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The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.
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You do what you do out of your private love of the thing itself.
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Dan Gerber is one of our finest living poets.
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It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave. It is hard to desecrate a grove and change your mind. The very holy mountains are keeping mum. We doused the burning bush and cannot rekindle it we are lighting matches in vain under every green tree.
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I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again.
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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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The universe is illusion merely, not one speck of it real, and we are not only its victims, falling always into or smashed by a planet slung by the sun-but also its captives, bound by the mineral-made ropes of our senses.
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Love so sprang at her, she honestly thought no one had ever looked into it. Where was it in literature? Someone would have written something. She must not have recognized it. Time to read everything again.
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The creatures I seek do not want to be seen.
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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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I am a fugitive and a vagabond, a sojourner seeking signs.
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Write as if you are dying.
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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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You can't test courage cautiously.
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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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The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring.
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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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Books swept me away, this way and that, one after the other I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them.
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