Quote

For writing a first draft requires from the writer a peculiar internal state which ordinary life does not induce. ... how to set yourself spinning?

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
Doe
Spinning
States
Internals
Firsts
Internal
First
Peculiar
Writing
Requires
Life
Ordinary
Writer
Induce
State
Draft

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He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write. He is careful of what he learns, for that is what he will know.
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I don't know what it is about fecundity that so appalls. I suppose it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonishingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful, and that with extravagance goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives.
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A shepherd on a hilltop who looks at a mess of stars and thinks, ‘There’s a hunter, a plow, a fish,’ is making mental connections that have as much real force in the universe as the very fires in those stars themselves.
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No child on earth was ever meant to be ordinary, and you can see it in them, and they know it, too, but then the times get to them, and the wear out their brains learning what folks expect, and spend their strength trying to rise over those same folks.
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Trees have a curious relationship to the subject of the present moment. There are many created things in the universe that outlive us, that outlive the sun, even, but I can't think about them. I live with trees.
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Who and of what import were the men whose bones bulk the Great Wall, the thirty million Mao starved, or the thirty million children not yet five who die each year now? Why, they are the insignificant others, of course living or dead, they are just some of the plentiful others...And you? To what end were we billions of oddballs born?
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She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.
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The universe that suckled us is a monster that does not care if we live or die--it does not care if it itself grinds to a halt. It is a beast running on chance and death, careening from nowhere to nowhere. It is fixed and blind, a robot programmed to kill. We are free and seeing we can only try to outwit it at every turn to save our lives.
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Private life, book life, took place where words met imagination without passing through the world.
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Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.
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You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it.
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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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There is no whit less enlightenment under the tree by your street than there was under the Buddha's bo tree. I invite you to go sit under that tree by your street.
Annie Dillard
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I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers.
Annie Dillard
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If you're going to publish a book, you probably are going to make a fool of yourself.
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When I walk with a camera, I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment's light prints on my own silver gut. When I see this second way I am above all an unscrupulous observer.
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The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.
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Our life seems cursed to be a wiggle merely, and a wandering without end.
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What I call innocence is the spirit's unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once a receptiveness and total concentration.
Annie Dillard
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He judged the instant and let go he flung himself loose into the stars.
Annie Dillard