Quote

Whenever there is stillness there is the still small voice, God's speaking from the whirlwind, nature's old song, and dance.

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
Whenever
Dance
Small
Voice
Song
Nature
Whirlwind
Stills
Stillness
Still
Speaking

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When I first read the words 'introvert' and 'extrovert' when I was 10, I thought I was both.
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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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Nature seems to exult in abounding radicality, extremism, anarchy. If we were to judge nature by its common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed. In nature, improbabilities are the one stock in trade. The whole creation is one lunatic fringe. ... No claims of any and all revelations could be so far-fetched as a single giraffe.
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I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.
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It could be that our faithlessness is a cowering cowardice born of our very smallness, a massive failure of imagination... If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldnt believe the world existed.
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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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There is neither a proportional relationship, nor an inverse one, between a writer’s estimation of a work in progress & its actual quality. The feeling that the work is magnificent, & the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged.
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We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall.
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The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring.
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What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.
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You can't test courage cautiously.
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A schedule defends from chaos and whim. A net for catching days.
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It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping God may wake someday and take offense, or the waking God may draw us out to where we can never return.
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Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.
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These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.
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Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
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Old memories are very easy to get except that once you write about something you've destroyed it.
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Those of us who read carried around with us like martyrs a secret knowledge, a secret joy, and a secret hope: There is a life worth living where history is still taking place there are ideas worth dying for, and circumstances where courage is still prized.
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Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.
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The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.
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