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He judged the instant and let go he flung himself loose into the stars.

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
Flung
Loose
Judged
Instant
Stars

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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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Buddhism notes that it is always a mistake to think your soul can go it alone.
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I wake up thinking: What am I reading? What will I read next? I'm terrified that I'll run out, that I will read through all I want to, and be forced to learn wildflowers at last, to keep awake.
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Young children have no sense of wonder. They bewilder well, but few things surprise them. All of it is new to young children, after all, and equally gratuitous.
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I break up through the skin of awareness a thousand times a day, as dolphins burst through seas, and dive again, and rise, and dive.
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Novels written with film contracts in mind have a faint but unmistakable, and ruinous, odor.
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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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Ecstasy, I think, is a soul's response to the waves holiness makes as it nears.
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The mind of the writer does indeed do something before it dies, and so does its owner, but I would be hard put to call it living.
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The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.
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The dear, stupid body is as easily satisfied as a spaniel.
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How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
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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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Nothing on earth is more gladdening than knowing we must roll up our sleeves and move back the boundaries of the humanly possible once more.
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If I actually believed that the progress of human understanding depended on our crop of contemporary novelists, I would shoot myself.
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God gave me a talent to draw. I 'owed' it to him to develop the talent.
Annie Dillard
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There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world lit or unlit as the light allows. When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it?
Annie Dillard
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Painters work from the ground up. The latest version of a painting overlays earlier versions, and obliterates them. Writers, on the other hand, work from left to right. The discardable chapters are on the left.
Annie Dillard
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Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don't affair. A fish flashes, then dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much salt. Deer apparently ascend bodily into heaven the brightest oriole fades into leaves.
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A schedule defends from chaos and whim. A net for catching days.
Annie Dillard