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

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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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The novel is a game or joke shared between author and reader.
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She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.
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Time is the continuous loop, the snakeskin with scales endlessly overlapping without beginning or end, or time is an ascending spiral if you will, like a child's toy Slinky.
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You do what you do out of your private love of the thing itself.
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The real and proper question is: why is it beautiful?
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Writers serve as the memory of a people. They chew over our public past.
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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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Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.
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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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It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave. It is hard to desecrate a grove and change your mind. The very holy mountains are keeping mum. We doused the burning bush and cannot rekindle it we are lighting matches in vain under every green tree.
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The more you read, the more you will write. The better the stuff you read, the better the stuff you will write.
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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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Old memories are very easy to get except that once you write about something you've destroyed it.
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We wake, if ever at all, to mystery.
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People who read are not too lazy to turn on the television they prefer books.
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For writing a first draft requires from the writer a peculiar internal state which ordinary life does not induce. ... how to set yourself spinning?
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It should surprise no one that the life of the writer - such as it is - is colorless to the point of sensory deprivation. Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.
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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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