Quote

I feel as though I stand at the foot of an infinitely high staircase, down which some exuberant spirit is flinging tennis ball after tennis ball, eternally, and the one thing I want in the world is a tennis ball.

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
World
Feet
Staircase
Stand
Staircases
High
Eternally
Though
Infinitely
Spirit
Foot
Feel
Tennis
Feels
Ball
Flinging
Thing
Balls
Exuberant

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I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.
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The silence is all there is. It is the alpha and the omega, it is God's brooding over the face of the waters it is the blinded note of the ten thousand things, the whine of wings. You take a step in the right direction to pray to this silence, and even to address the prayer to World. Distinctions blur. Quit your tents. Pray without ceasing.
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Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a word to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and delight, the canary that sings on the skull.
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A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order - willed, faked, and so brought into being.
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What is important is the moment of opening a life and feeling it touch--with an electric hiss and cry--this speckled mineral sphere, our present world.
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It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as separating us from our creator, our very self-consciousness, is also the one thing that divides us from our fellow creatures. It was a bitter birthday present from evolution.
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The Pulitzer is more useful than meaningful.
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At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it.
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Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.
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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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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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Silence is not our heritage but our destiny we live where we want to live.
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If even rock was interesting, if even this ugliness was worth whole shelves at the library, required sophisticated tools to study, and inspired grown men to crack mountains and saw crystals--then what wasn't?
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The soul may ask God for anything, and never fail.
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Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.
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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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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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Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.
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Your feelings are none of your business.
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According to Inuit culture in Greenland, a person possesses six or seven souls. The souls take the form of tiny people scattered throughout the body.
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