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

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We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence.
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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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The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.
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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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Divinity is not playful. The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensibl e earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and fleet. There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see.
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If I actually believed that the progress of human understanding depended on our crop of contemporary novelists, I would shoot myself.
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When you write, you lay out a line of words. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory.
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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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I worked so hard all my life, and all I want to do now is read.
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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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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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Could two live that way? Could two live under the wild rose, and explore by the pond, so that the smooth mind of each is as everywhere present to the other, and as received and as unchallenged, as falling snow?
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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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The body of literature, with its limits and edges, exists outside some people and inside others. Only after the writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature.
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if you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not.
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Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.
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You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it to the page. The page is jealous and tyrannical the page is made of time and matter the page always wins.
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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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