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I saw in a blue haze all the world poured flat and pale between the mountains

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
Flat
Flats
Pale
Mountains
Mountain
Blue
Saws
Haze
World
Poured

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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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I cannot cause light the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam.
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What is a house but a bigger skin, and a neighborhood map but the world's skin ever expanding?
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The life of sensation is the life of greed it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less.
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Just once I wanted a task that required all the joy I had. Day after day I had noticed that if I waited long enough, my strong unexpressed joy would dwindle and dissipate inside me, like a fire subsiding . . . . Just this once I wanted to let it rip.
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The mind wants the world to return its love, or its awareness the mind wants to know all the world, and all eternity, and God.
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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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You can serve or you can sing, and wreck your heart in prayer, working the world's hard work.
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The way you live your days is the way you live your life.
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I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you.
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What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
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Whenever an encounter between a writer of good will and a regular person of good will happens to touch on the subject of writing, each person discovers, dismayed, that good will is of no earthly use. The conversation cannot proceed.
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Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.
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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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The real and proper question is: why is it beautiful?
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poetry has been able to function quite directly as human interpretation of the raw, loose universe. It is a mixture, if you will, of journalism and metaphysics, or of science and religion.
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You do what you do out of your private love of the thing itself.
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Our family was on the lunatic fringe. My mother was always completely irrepressible. My father made crowd noises into a microphone.
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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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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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