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

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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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We are here to witness the creation and to abet it.
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Dan Gerber is one of our finest living poets.
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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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People who read are not too lazy to turn on the television they prefer books.
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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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Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.
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An Eskimo shaman said, Life's greatest danger lies in the fact that man's food consists entirely of souls.
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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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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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For all the insularity of the old guard, Pittsburgh was always an open and democratic town.
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I work mornings only. I go out to lunch. Afternoons I play with the baby, walk with my husband, or shovel mail.
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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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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.
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Last forever!' Who hasn't prayed that prayer? You were lucky to get it in the first place. The present is a freely given canvas. That it is constantly being ripped apart and washed downstream goes without saying.
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Caring passionately about something isn't against nature, and it isn't against human nature. It's what we're here to do.
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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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I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as a dying friend. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.
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I cannot imagine a sorrier pursuit than struggling for years to write a book that attempts to appeal to people who do not read in the first place.
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