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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Almost all of my many passionate interests, and my many changes of mind, came through books. Books prompted the many vows I made to myself.
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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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Buddhism notes that it is always a mistake to think your soul can go it alone.
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Just once I wanted a task that required all the joy I had. Day after day I had noticed that if I waited long enough, my strong unexpressed joy would dwindle and dissipate inside me, like a fire subsiding . . . . Just this once I wanted to let it rip.
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How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and with that one, is what we are doing.
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Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.
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Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation's short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit.
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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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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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I alternate between thinking of the planet as home - dear and familiar stone hearth and garden - and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners.
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We are here to witness. There is nothing else to do with those mute materials we do not need. Until Larry teaches his stone to talk, until God changes his mind, or until the pagan gods slip back to their hilltop groves, all we can do with the whole inhuman array is watch it.
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The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper I cannot quite make it out.
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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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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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Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.
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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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The way we live our days, is the way we live our lives.
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He judged the instant and let go he flung himself loose into the stars.
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About five years ago I saw a mockingbird make a straight vertical descent from the roof gutter of a four-story building. It was an act as careless and spontaneous as the curl of a stem or the kindling of a star.
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I cannot cause light the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam.
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