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It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.

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
Like
Glances
Seen
Seeing
Powerful
Less
Firsts
Breathless
First
Glance
Time
Knocked

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A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.
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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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I work mornings only. I go out to lunch. Afternoons I play with the baby, walk with my husband, or shovel mail.
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Having chosen this foolishness, I was a free being. How could the world ever stop me, how could I betray myself, if I was not afraid?
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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 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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A schedule defends from chaos and whim. A net for catching days.
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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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You can serve or you can sing, and wreck your heart in prayer, working the world's hard work.
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Nothing on earth is more gladdening than knowing we must roll up our sleeves and move back the boundaries of the humanly possible once more.
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Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don't affair. A fish flashes, then dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much salt. Deer apparently ascend bodily into heaven the brightest oriole fades into leaves.
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Your feelings are none of your business.
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The sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain. This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is.
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Silence is not our heritage but our destiny we live where we want to live.
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Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.
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I wake up thinking: What am I reading? What will I read next? I'm terrified that I'll run out, that I will read through all I want to, and be forced to learn wildflowers at last, to keep awake.
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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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why did I have to keep learning this same thing over and over?
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The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring. It is the sensation of a stunt pilot's turning barrel rolls, or an inchworm's blind rearing from a stem in search of a route. At its worst, it feels like alligator wrestling, at the level of the sentence.
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I write in my own journal when something extraordinary or funny happens. And there's some nice imagery in there. I don't think of what to do with it.
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