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An Inuit hunter asked the local missionary priest: If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell? No, said the priest, not if you did not know. Then why, asked the Inuit earnestly, 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
Hell
Hunters
Religion
Missionary
Tell
Priests
Would
Locals
Life
Local
Inuit
Atheism
Earnestly
Sin
Hunter
Asked
Priest

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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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Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a word to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and delight, the canary that sings on the skull.
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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.
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I woke at intervals until . . . the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not.
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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 creatures I seek do not want to be seen.
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We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all.
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The courage of children and beasts is a function of innocence.
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The mind itself is an art object. It is a Mondrian canvas onto whose homemade grids it fits its own preselected products. Our knowledge is contextual and only contextual. Ordering and invention coincide: we call their collaboration knowledge.
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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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Whenever an encounter between a writer of good will and a regular person of good will happens to touch on the subject of writing, each person discovers, dismayed, that good will is of no earthly use. The conversation cannot proceed.
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I had been chipping at the world idly, and had by accident uncovered vast and labyrinthine further worlds within it.
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Buddhism notes that it is always a mistake to think your soul can go it alone.
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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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People who read are not too lazy to turn on the television they prefer books.
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There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by.
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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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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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