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

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It makes more sense to write one big book - a novel or nonfiction narrative - than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all you possess and learn.
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Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand - that of finding workable compromises between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us.
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The painter... does not fit the paints to the world. He most certainly does not fit the world to himself. He fits himself to the paint. The self is the servant who bears the paintbox and its inherited contents.
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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.
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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.
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Trees have a curious relationship to the subject of the present moment. There are many created things in the universe that outlive us, that outlive the sun, even, but I can't think about them. I live with trees.
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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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According to Inuit culture in Greenland, a person possesses six or seven souls. The souls take the form of tiny people scattered throughout the body.
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We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence.
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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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People who read are not too lazy to turn on the television they prefer books.
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Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.
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No one escapes the wilderness on the way to the promised land.
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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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It's a little silly to finally learn how to write at this age. But I long ago realized I was secretly sincere.
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The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.
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Every spring he vowed to quit teaching school, and every summer he missed his pupils and searched for them on the streets.
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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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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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It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.
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