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

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It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping God may wake someday and take offense, or the waking God may draw us out to where we can never return.
Annie Dillard
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The mind itself is an art object. It is a Mondrian canvas onto whose homemade grids it fits its own preselected products. Our knowledge is contextual and only contextual. Ordering and invention coincide: we call their collaboration knowledge.
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Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?
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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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Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.
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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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The Pulitzer is more useful than meaningful.
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The courage of children and beasts is a function of innocence.
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How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and with that one, is what we are doing.
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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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Unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous.
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How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
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What have we been doing all these centuries but trying to call God back to the mountain, or, failing that, raise a peep out of anything that isn't us? What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are not they both saying: Hello? We spy on whales and on interstellar radio objects we starve ourselves and pray till we're blue.
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Let the grass die. I let almost all of my indoor plants die from neglect while I was writing the book. There are all kinds of ways to live. You can take your choice. You can keep a tidy house, and when St. Peter asks you what you did with your life, you can say, I kept a tidy house, I made my own cheese balls.
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Every spring he vowed to quit teaching school, and every summer he missed his pupils and searched for them on the streets.
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I worked so hard all my life, and all I want to do now is read.
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Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
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I can't dance anymore. Total knee replacements. I can't do anything anymore.
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If I actually believed that the progress of human understanding depended on our crop of contemporary novelists, I would shoot myself.
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The mind itself is an art object ... The mind is a blue guitar on which we improvise the song of the world.
Annie Dillard