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Last forever!' Who hasn't prayed that prayer? You were lucky to get it in the first place. The present is a freely given canvas. That it is constantly being ripped apart and washed downstream goes without saying.

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
Forever
Apart
Lasts
Constantly
Downstream
Last
Inspiring
Washed
Given
Lucky
Prayed
Place
Goes
Ripped
Firsts
Present
Freely
Without
Saying
Canvas
First
Prayer
Hasn

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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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An Inuit hunter asked the local missionary priest: If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell? No, said the priest, not if you did not know. Then why, asked the Inuit earnestly, did you tell me?
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The novel is a game or joke shared between author and reader.
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The mind wants the world to return its love, or its awareness the mind wants to know all the world, and all eternity, and God.
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One of the few things I know about writing is this: Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book, give it, give it all, give it now.
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How can people think that artists seek a name? A name, like a face, is something you have when you're not alone. There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world, lit or unlit as the light allows.
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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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I worked so hard all my life, and all I want to do now is read.
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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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I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too.
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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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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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You can't test courage cautiously, so I ran hard and waved my arms hard, happy.
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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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We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up. We teach our children to look alive there, to join by words and activities the life of human culture on the planet
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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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What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
Annie Dillard
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Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you.
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The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.
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A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order - willed, faked, and so brought into being.
Annie Dillard