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Cruelty is a mystery, and a waste of pain.

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
Mystery
Pain
Cruelty
Waste

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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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We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall.
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Push it. examine all things intensely and relentlessly.
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Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand - that of finding workable compromises between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us.
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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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The irrational haunts the metaphysical.
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Those of us who read carried around with us like martyrs a secret knowledge, a secret joy, and a secret hope: There is a life worth living where history is still taking place there are ideas worth dying for, and circumstances where courage is still prized.
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I couldn't unpeach the peaches.
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The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.
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Nothing on earth is more gladdening than knowing we must roll up our sleeves and move back the boundaries of the humanly possible once more.
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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.
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Write about winter in the summer. Describe Norway as Ibsen did, from a desk in Italy describe Dublin as James Joyce did, from a desk in Paris. Willa Cather wrote her prairie novels in New York City Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn in Hartford, Connecticut. Recently, scholars learned that Walt Whitman rarely left his room.
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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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The sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain. This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is.
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I know only enough of God to want to worship him, by any means ready to hand.
Annie Dillard
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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 would like to learn, or remember, how to live.
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We are here on the planet only once, and might as well get a feel for the place.
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Nothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves.
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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.
Annie Dillard