Quote

I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.

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
Eye
Tinder
Water
Flint
Look
Sparks
Come
Flames
Looks
Everywhere
Whole
Cool
World
Fire
Eyes

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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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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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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.
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Your feelings are none of your business.
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We are here to abet creation and to witness to it, to notice each other's beautiful face and complex nature so that creation need not play to an empty house.
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Ecstasy, I think, is a soul's response to the waves holiness makes as it nears.
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I am sorry I ran from you. I am still running, running from that knowledge, that eye, that love from which there is no refuge. For you meant only love, and love, and I felt only fear, and pain. So once in Israel love came to us incarnate, stood in the doorway between two worlds, and we were all afraid.
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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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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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I couldn't unpeach the peaches.
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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 would like to live. . . open to time and death painlessly, noticing everything, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will.
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I know only enough of God to want to worship him, by any means ready to hand.
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The point of going somewhere like the Napo River in Ecuador is not to see the most spectacular anything. It is simply to see what is there.
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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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Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.
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I worked so hard all my life, and all I want to do now is read.
Annie Dillard
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We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up. We teach our children to look alive there, to join by words and activities the life of human culture on the planet
Annie Dillard
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Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don't affair. A fish flashes, then dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much salt. Deer apparently ascend bodily into heaven the brightest oriole fades into leaves.
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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.
Annie Dillard