Quote

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.

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
Wider
Directions
Raising
Bright
Lazarus
Bitter
Hay
Dangerous
Cain
Making
Tomatoes
World
Extravagant

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The real and proper question is: why is it beautiful?
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I noticed this process of waking, and predicted with terrifying logic that one of these years not far away I would be awake continuously and never slip back, and never be free of myself again.
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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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The creatures I seek do not want to be seen.
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Just once I wanted a task that required all the joy I had. Day after day I had noticed that if I waited long enough, my strong unexpressed joy would dwindle and dissipate inside me, like a fire subsiding . . . . Just this once I wanted to let it rip.
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I saw in a blue haze all the world poured flat and pale between the mountains
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People who take photographs during their whole vacation won't remember their vacation. They'll only remember what photographs they took.
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Nothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves.
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There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.
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Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you.
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You do what you do out of your private love of the thing itself.
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Could two live that way? Could two live under the wild rose, and explore by the pond, so that the smooth mind of each is as everywhere present to the other, and as received and as unchallenged, as falling snow?
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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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All my books started out as extravagant and ended up pure and plain.
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Push it. examine all things intensely and relentlessly.
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Nature's silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block.
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poetry has been able to function quite directly as human interpretation of the raw, loose universe. It is a mixture, if you will, of journalism and metaphysics, or of science and religion.
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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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