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There are no events but thoughts and the heart's hard turning, the heart's slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times.

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
Learning
Gossip
Times
Turning
Hard
Tales
Heart
Slow
Love
Merely
Thoughts
Events
Rest

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I am a fugitive and a vagabond, a sojourner seeking signs.
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She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.
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The soul may ask God for anything, and never fail.
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why did I have to keep learning this same thing over and over?
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A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.
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Make connections let rip and dance where you can.
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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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I still try to keep my eyes open. I'm always on the lookout for antlion traps in sandy soil, monarch pupae near milkweed, skipper larvae in locust leaves. These things are utterly common, and I've not seen one
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Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf
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Having chosen this foolishness, I was a free being. How could the world ever stop me, how could I betray myself, if I was not afraid?
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It's a little silly to finally learn how to write at this age. But I long ago realized I was secretly sincere.
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Novels written with film contracts in mind have a faint but unmistakable, and ruinous, odor.
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Like any child, I slid into myself perfectly fitted, as a diver meets her reflection in a pool. Her fingertips enter the fingertips on the water, her wrists slide up her arms. The diver wraps herself in her reflection wholly, sealing it at the toes, and wears it as she climbs rising from the pool, and ever after.
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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.
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Crystals grew inside rock like arithmetic flowers. They lengthened and spread, added plane to plane in an awed and perfect obedience to an absolute geometry that even stones - maybe only the stones - understood.
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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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I alternate between thinking of the planet as home - dear and familiar stone hearth and garden - and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners.
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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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If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed.
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The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper I cannot quite make it out.
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