Quote

What is important is the moment of opening a life and feeling it touch--with an electric hiss and cry--this speckled mineral sphere, our present world.

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
Feeling
Minerals
Moment
Sphere
Feelings
Spheres
Moments
Electric
Important
Opening
Life
Cry
Speckled
World
Touch
Hiss
Present
Mineral

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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I wake expectant, hoping to see a new thing.
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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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As a life's work, I would remember everything - everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net.
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You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it... The vision is not so much destroyed, exactly, as it is, by the time you have finished, forgotten. It has been replaced by this changeling.
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Push it. examine all things intensely and relentlessly.
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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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What is a house but a bigger skin, and a neighborhood map but the world's skin ever expanding?
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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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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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The reader's ear must adjust down from loud life to the subtle, imaginary sounds of the written word. An ordinary reader picking up a book can't yet hear a thing it will take half an hour to pick up the writing's modulations, its ups and downs and louds and softs.
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I saw in a blue haze all the world poured flat and pale between the mountains
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A schedule defends from chaos and whim. A net for catching days.
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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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You can't test courage cautiously.
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Admire the world for never ending on you -- as you would an opponent, without taking your eyes away from him, or walking away.
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I woke at intervals until . . . the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not.
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I have since only rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam.
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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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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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It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave.
Annie Dillard