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We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet.

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
Flicks
Beetle
Beetles
Encountered
Merciful
Feet
Men

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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
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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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There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been.
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Doing something does not require discipline. It creates its own discipline - with a little help from caffeine.
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On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away.
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if you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not.
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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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I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again.
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Adverbs are a sign that you've used the wrong verb.
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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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Love so sprang at her, she honestly thought no one had ever looked into it. Where was it in literature? Someone would have written something. She must not have recognized it. Time to read everything again.
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Writers serve as the memory of a people. They chew over our public past.
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You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it to the page. The page is jealous and tyrannical the page is made of time and matter the page always wins.
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It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as separating us from our creator, our very self-consciousness, is also the one thing that divides us from our fellow creatures. It was a bitter birthday present from evolution.
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Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.
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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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Does anything eat flowers. I couldn't recall having seen anything eat a flower - are they nature's privileged pets?
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You can't test courage cautiously.
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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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The way you live your days is the way you live your life.
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