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What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.

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
Stuff
Time
Borne
Like
Holiness
Spread
Surface
Lies
Color
Lying

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Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.
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Old memories are very easy to get except that once you write about something you've destroyed it.
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The creatures I seek do not want to be seen.
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Whenever an encounter between a writer of good will and a regular person of good will happens to touch on the subject of writing, each person discovers, dismayed, that good will is of no earthly use. The conversation cannot proceed.
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Young children have no sense of wonder. They bewilder well, but few things surprise them. All of it is new to young children, after all, and equally gratuitous.
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Your feelings are none of your business.
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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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Novels written with film contracts in mind have a faint but unmistakable, and ruinous, odor.
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Write as if you are dying.
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I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as a dying friend. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.
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Theirs is the mystery of continuous creation and all that providence implies: the uncertainty of vision, the horror of the fixed, the dissolution of the present, the intricacy of beauty, the pressure of fecundity, the elusiveness of the free, and the flawed nature of perfection.
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There must be bands of enthusiasts for everything on earth-fanatics who shared a vocabulary, a batch of technical skills and equipment, and, perhaps, a vision of some single slice of the beauty and mystery of things, of their complexity, fascination, and unexpectedness.
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The universe that suckled us is a monster that does not care if we live or die--it does not care if it itself grinds to a halt. It is a beast running on chance and death, careening from nowhere to nowhere. It is fixed and blind, a robot programmed to kill. We are free and seeing we can only try to outwit it at every turn to save our lives.
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We are here to witness the creation and to abet it.
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Our family was on the lunatic fringe. My mother was always completely irrepressible. My father made crowd noises into a microphone.
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You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it.
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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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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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I'd seen a great many partial eclipses, but a partial eclipse has the same relation to a total eclipse as flirting with a man does to marrying him. It's completely different.
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