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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.

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
Garden
Alternate
Land
Exile
Home
Stone
Hard
Familiar
Thinking
Stones
Planet
Dear
Sojourners
Planets
Hearth

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But enough is enough. One turns at last even from glory itself with a sigh of relief. From the depths of mystery, and even from the heights of splendor, we bounce back and hurry for the latitudes of home.
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Painters work from the ground up. The latest version of a painting overlays earlier versions, and obliterates them. Writers, on the other hand, work from left to right. The discardable chapters are on the left.
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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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We wake, if ever at all, to mystery.
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Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?
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Silence is not our heritage but our destiny we live where we want to live.
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You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it... The vision is not so much destroyed, exactly, as it is, by the time you have finished, forgotten. It has been replaced by this changeling.
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A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.
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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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Skin was earth it was soil. I could see, even on my own skin, the joined trapezoids of dust specks God had wetted and stuck with his spit the morning he made Adam from dirt. Now, all these generations later, we people could still see on our skin the inherited prints of the dust specks of Eden.
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Nothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves.
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Unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous.
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Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.
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Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.
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When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner's pick, a wood carver's gouge, a surgeon's probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year.
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I know only enough of God to want to worship him, by any means ready to hand.
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At night I read and write, and things I have never understood become clear I reap the harvest of the rest of the year's planting
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The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.
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I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.
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Cruelty is a mystery, and a waste of pain.
Annie Dillard