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I had been chipping at the world idly, and had by accident uncovered vast and labyrinthine further worlds within it.

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
Idly
Accident
Worlds
Vast
Accidents
Within
Labyrinthine
World
Chipping
Uncovered

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale.
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At night I read and write, and things I have never understood become clear I reap the harvest of the rest of the year's planting
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There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.
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I'm a housewife: I spend far more time on housework than anything else.
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There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been.
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You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then-and only then-it is handed to you.
Annie Dillard
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When I walk with a camera, I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment's light prints on my own silver gut. When I see this second way I am above all an unscrupulous observer.
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Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me. This is easy to write, easy to read, and hard to believe.
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Write about winter in the summer. Describe Norway as Ibsen did, from a desk in Italy describe Dublin as James Joyce did, from a desk in Paris. Willa Cather wrote her prairie novels in New York City Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn in Hartford, Connecticut. Recently, scholars learned that Walt Whitman rarely left his room.
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I wake expectant, hoping to see a new thing.
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We still and always want waking.
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Today is one of those excellent January partly cloudies in which light chooses an unexpected part of the landscape to trick out in gilt, and then the shadow sweeps it away. You know you're alive. You take huge steps, trying to feel the planet's roundness arc between your feet.
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You can't test courage cautiously, so I ran hard and waved my arms hard, happy.
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When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner's pick, a wood carver's gouge, a surgeon's probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year.
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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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We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet.
Annie Dillard
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The more you read, the more you will write. The better the stuff you read, the better the stuff you will write.
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The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.
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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?
Annie Dillard
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You do what you do out of your private love of the thing itself.
Annie Dillard