Quote

I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you.

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
Thinking
Wherever
Life
Positive
Dangle
Pure
Weasels
Takes
Limp
Wells
Obedient
Well
Grasp
Would
Necessity
Think
Proper

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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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I know only enough of God to want to worship him, by any means ready to hand.
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Skin was earth it was soil. I could see, even on my own skin, the joined trapezoids of dust specks God had wetted and stuck with his spit the morning he made Adam from dirt. Now, all these generations later, we people could still see on our skin the inherited prints of the dust specks of Eden.
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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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It makes more sense to write one big book - a novel or nonfiction narrative - than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all you possess and learn.
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The creatures I seek do not want to be seen.
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The way to learn about a writer is to read the text. Or texts.
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We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall.
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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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You can't test courage cautiously, so I ran hard and waved my arms hard, happy.
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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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Just once I wanted a task that required all the joy I had. Day after day I had noticed that if I waited long enough, my strong unexpressed joy would dwindle and dissipate inside me, like a fire subsiding . . . . Just this once I wanted to let it rip.
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I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.
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All my books started out as extravagant and ended up pure and plain.
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We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all.
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We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us.
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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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Are you living just a little and calling that life?
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The mind itself is an art object ... The mind is a blue guitar on which we improvise the song of the world.
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At a certain point, you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening.
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