Quote

If even rock was interesting, if even this ugliness was worth whole shelves at the library, required sophisticated tools to study, and inspired grown men to crack mountains and saw crystals--then what wasn't?

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
Saws
Mountains
Worth
Grown
Crystals
Wasn
Library
Ugliness
Study
Inspired
Crack
Interesting
Tools
Shelves
Whole
Mountain
Cracks
Even
Rock
Sophisticated
Men
Rocks
Required

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It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave.
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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.
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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 saw in a blue haze all the world poured flat and pale between the mountains
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Geography is the key, the crucial accident of birth. A piece of protein could be a snail, a sea lion, or a systems analyst, but it had to start somewhere. This is not science it is merely metaphor. And the landscape in which the protein starts shapes its end as surely as bowls shape water.
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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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All my books started out as extravagant and ended up pure and plain.
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I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers.
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It's a little silly to finally learn how to write at this age. But I long ago realized I was secretly sincere.
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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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The mind of the writer does indeed do something before it dies, and so does its owner, but I would be hard put to call it living.
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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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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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Painters work from the ground up. The latest version of a painting overlays earlier versions, and obliterates them. Writers, on the other hand, work from left to right. The discardable chapters are on the left.
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Fiction keeps its audience by retaining the world as its subject matter. People like the world. Many people actually prefer it to art and spend their days by choice in the thick of it.
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The way to learn about a writer is to read the text. Or texts.
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We wake, if ever at all, to mystery.
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Are you living just a little and calling that life?
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I break up through the skin of awareness a thousand times a day, as dolphins burst through seas, and dive again, and rise, and dive.
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There is neither a proportional relationship, nor an inverse one, between a writer’s estimation of a work in progress & its actual quality. The feeling that the work is magnificent, & the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged.
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