Quote

It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale.

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
Every
Whether
Shelves
Always
Happy
Tale
Wish
Continues
Running
Runs
Creek
Night
Closed
Creeks
Thought
Tales
Inexhaustible
Care
Minute
Shelf
Book
Minutes
Whisper

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You have to take pains in a memoir not to hang on the reader's arm, like a drunk, and say, 'And then I did this and it was so interesting.
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Time is the warp and matter the weft of the woven texture of beauty in space, and death is the hurling shuttle.
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The point of going somewhere like the Napo River in Ecuador is not to see the most spectacular anything. It is simply to see what is there.
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The Pulitzer is more useful than meaningful.
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Today is one of those excellent January partly cloudies in which light chooses an unexpected part of the landscape to trick out in gilt, and then the shadow sweeps it away. You know you're alive. You take huge steps, trying to feel the planet's roundness arc between your feet.
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The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.
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I couldn't unpeach the peaches.
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You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you hear it: There is nothing there...You feel the world's word as a tension, a hum, a single chorused note everywhere the same. This is it: This hum is the silence.
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Does anything eat flowers. I couldn't recall having seen anything eat a flower - are they nature's privileged pets?
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Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me. This is easy to write, easy to read, and hard to believe.
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The body of literature, with its limits and edges, exists outside some people and inside others. Only after the writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature.
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You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then-and only then-it is handed to you.
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The universe that suckled us is a monster that does not care if we live or die--it does not care if it itself grinds to a halt. It is a beast running on chance and death, careening from nowhere to nowhere. It is fixed and blind, a robot programmed to kill. We are free and seeing we can only try to outwit it at every turn to save our lives.
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How can people think that artists seek a name? A name, like a face, is something you have when you're not alone. There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world, lit or unlit as the light allows.
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Adverbs are a sign that you've used the wrong verb.
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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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God gave me a talent to draw. I 'owed' it to him to develop the talent.
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Cruelty is a mystery, and a waste of pain.
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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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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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