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

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A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order - willed, faked, and so brought into being.
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Does anything eat flowers. I couldn't recall having seen anything eat a flower - are they nature's privileged pets?
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There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.
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The world is wider in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain and Lazarus.
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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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Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?
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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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You can't test courage cautiously, so I ran hard and waved my arms hard, happy.
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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 makes more sense to write one big book - a novel or nonfiction narrative - than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all you possess and learn.
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I think the dying pray at the last not please, but thank you, as a guest thanks his host at the door.
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Geography is the key, the crucial accident of birth. A piece of protein could be a snail, a sea lion, or a systems analyst, but it had to start somewhere. This is not science it is merely metaphor. And the landscape in which the protein starts shapes its end as surely as bowls shape water.
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You do what you do out of your private love of the thing itself.
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Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.
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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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Your freedom as a writer is not freedom of expression in the sense of wild blurting you may not let rip. It is life at its most free, if you are fortunate enough to be able to try it, because you select your materials, invent your task, and pace yourself.
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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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As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.
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A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.
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The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest.
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