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These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.

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
Purely
Seasons
Present
Live

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The real and proper question is: why is it beautiful?
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I'd seen a great many partial eclipses, but a partial eclipse has the same relation to a total eclipse as flirting with a man does to marrying him. It's completely different.
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Let the grass die. I let almost all of my indoor plants die from neglect while I was writing the book. There are all kinds of ways to live. You can take your choice. You can keep a tidy house, and when St. Peter asks you what you did with your life, you can say, I kept a tidy house, I made my own cheese balls.
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As a life's work, I would remember everything - everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net.
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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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But enough is enough. One turns at last even from glory itself with a sigh of relief. From the depths of mystery, and even from the heights of splendor, we bounce back and hurry for the latitudes of home.
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The way we live our days, is the way we live our lives.
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What is a house but a bigger skin, and a neighborhood map but the world's skin ever expanding?
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Time is the continuous loop, the snakeskin with scales endlessly overlapping without beginning or end, or time is an ascending spiral if you will, like a child's toy Slinky.
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When I first read the words 'introvert' and 'extrovert' when I was 10, I thought I was both.
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When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner's pick, a wood carver's gouge, a surgeon's probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year.
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Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.
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The universe is illusion merely, not one speck of it real, and we are not only its victims, falling always into or smashed by a planet slung by the sun-but also its captives, bound by the mineral-made ropes of our senses.
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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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A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.
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I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.
Annie Dillard
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Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
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The surest sign of age is loneliness.
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Books swept me away, this way and that, one after the other I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them.
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The life of sensation is the life of greed it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less.
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