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

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Nature seems to exult in abounding radicality, extremism, anarchy. If we were to judge nature by its common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed. In nature, improbabilities are the one stock in trade. The whole creation is one lunatic fringe. ... No claims of any and all revelations could be so far-fetched as a single giraffe.
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Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.
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You have to take pains in a memoir not to hang on the reader's arm, like a drunk, and say, 'And then I did this and it was so interesting.
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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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The real and proper question is: why is it beautiful?
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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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What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.
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Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?
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Like any child, I slid into myself perfectly fitted, as a diver meets her reflection in a pool. Her fingertips enter the fingertips on the water, her wrists slide up her arms. The diver wraps herself in her reflection wholly, sealing it at the toes, and wears it as she climbs rising from the pool, and ever after.
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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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A schedule defends from chaos and whim. A net for catching days.
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You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you hear it: There is nothing there...You feel the world's word as a tension, a hum, a single chorused note everywhere the same. This is it: This hum is the silence.
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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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When you write, you lay out a line of words. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory.
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I woke at intervals until . . . the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not.
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[Insects] are not only cold-blooded, and green- and yellow-blooded, but are also cased in a clacking horn. They have rigid eyes and brains strung down their backs. But they make up the bulk of our comrades-at-life, so I look to them for a glimmer of companionship.
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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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Every day is a god, each day is a god, and holiness holds forth in time.
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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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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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