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We are here to witness the creation and to abet 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
Abet
Witness
Healing
Creation

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You do what you do out of your private love of the thing itself.
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When I first read the words 'introvert' and 'extrovert' when I was 10, I thought I was both.
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Your feelings are none of your business.
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I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again.
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By dipping us children in the Bible so often, they hoped, I think, to give our lives a serious tint, and to provide us with quaintly magnificent snatches of prayer to produce as charms while, say, being mugged for our cash or jewels.
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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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Landscape consists in the multiple, overlapping intricacies and forms that exist in a given space at a moment in time.
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Cruelty is a mystery, and a waste of pain.
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We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all.
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We are here to witness. There is nothing else to do with those mute materials we do not need. Until Larry teaches his stone to talk, until God changes his mind, or until the pagan gods slip back to their hilltop groves, all we can do with the whole inhuman array is watch it.
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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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I think that the dying pray at the last not please but thank you, as a guest thanks his host at the door. Falling from airplanes the people are crying thank you, thank you, all down the air and the cold carriages draw up for them on the rocks.
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Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a word to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and delight, the canary that sings on the skull.
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Just think: in all the clean, beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a blot our planet alone has death.
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For all the insularity of the old guard, Pittsburgh was always an open and democratic town.
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I am a fugitive and a vagabond, a sojourner seeking signs.
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I cannot cause light the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam.
Annie Dillard
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Put yourself out of your misery.
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Private life, book life, took place where words met imagination without passing through the world.
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We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us.
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