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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?

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
Two
Received
Live
Falling
Mind
Snow
Way
Wild
Unchallenged
Everywhere
Pond
Rose
Ponds
Present
Smooth
Fall
Explore

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The creative process obtains in all creative acts. So if I'm painting suddenly I'll see something that I didn't see before.
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As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.
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I have since only rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam.
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Novels written with film contracts in mind have a faint but unmistakable, and ruinous, odor.
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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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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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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?
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Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.
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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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What have we been doing all these centuries but trying to call God back to the mountain, or, failing that, raise a peep out of anything that isn't us? What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are not they both saying: Hello? We spy on whales and on interstellar radio objects we starve ourselves and pray till we're blue.
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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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I wake expectant, hoping to see a new thing.
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The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest.
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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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Geography is the key, the crucial accident of birth. A piece of protein could be a snail, a sea lion, or a systems analyst, but it had to start somewhere. This is not science it is merely metaphor. And the landscape in which the protein starts shapes its end as surely as bowls shape water.
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Cruelty is a mystery, and a waste of pain.
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Admire the world for never ending on you -- as you would an opponent, without taking your eyes away from him, or walking away.
Annie Dillard
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The novel is a game or joke shared between author and reader.
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You can't test courage cautiously.
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The silence is all there is. It is the alpha and the omega, it is God's brooding over the face of the waters it is the blinded note of the ten thousand things, the whine of wings. You take a step in the right direction to pray to this silence, and even to address the prayer to World. Distinctions blur. Quit your tents. Pray without ceasing.
Annie Dillard