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We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence.

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
Wake
Mystery
Violence
Beauty
Death
Ever
Rumors
Rumor

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We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us.
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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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Doing something does not require discipline. It creates its own discipline - with a little help from caffeine.
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The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.
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I wake expectant, hoping to see a new thing.
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The surest sign of age is loneliness.
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These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.
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When you write, you lay out a line of words. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory.
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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 mind itself is an art object. It is a Mondrian canvas onto whose homemade grids it fits its own preselected products. Our knowledge is contextual and only contextual. Ordering and invention coincide: we call their collaboration knowledge.
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The point of going somewhere like the Napo River in Ecuador is not to see the most spectacular anything. It is simply to see what is there.
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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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What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
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Whenever an encounter between a writer of good will and a regular person of good will happens to touch on the subject of writing, each person discovers, dismayed, that good will is of no earthly use. The conversation cannot proceed.
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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.
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Unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous.
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Experiencing the present purely is being empty and hollow you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.
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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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Nature seems to exult in abounding radicality, extremism, anarchy. If we were to judge nature by its common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed. In nature, improbabilities are the one stock in trade. The whole creation is one lunatic fringe. ... No claims of any and all revelations could be so far-fetched as a single giraffe.
Annie Dillard
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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.
Annie Dillard