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Then why did you tell me?

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
Atheist
Atheism
Religion
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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.
Annie Dillard
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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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The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring.
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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.
Annie Dillard
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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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[Insects] are not only cold-blooded, and green- and yellow-blooded, but are also cased in a clacking horn. They have rigid eyes and brains strung down their backs. But they make up the bulk of our comrades-at-life, so I look to them for a glimmer of companionship.
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We wake, if ever at all, to mystery.
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Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.
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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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As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.
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No one can help you if you're stuck in a work. Only you can figure a way out, because only you can see the work's possibilities.
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Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.
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Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.
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Our family was on the lunatic fringe. My mother was always completely irrepressible. My father made crowd noises into a microphone.
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Like everyone in his right mind, I feared Santa Claus.
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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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He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write. He is careful of what he learns, for that is what he will know.
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I work mornings only. I go out to lunch. Afternoons I play with the baby, walk with my husband, or shovel mail.
Annie Dillard
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An Eskimo shaman said, Life's greatest danger lies in the fact that man's food consists entirely of souls.
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I worked so hard all my life, and all I want to do now is read.
Annie Dillard