Quote

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.

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
Writing
Pages
Writer
Days
Four
Write
Away
Concludes
Three
Plenty
Must
Throw

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Dan Gerber is one of our finest living poets.
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I'm a housewife: I spend far more time on housework than anything else.
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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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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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Cruelty is a mystery, and a waste of pain.
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Who and of what import were the men whose bones bulk the Great Wall, the thirty million Mao starved, or the thirty million children not yet five who die each year now? Why, they are the insignificant others, of course living or dead, they are just some of the plentiful others...And you? To what end were we billions of oddballs born?
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I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you.
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We wake, if ever at all, to mystery.
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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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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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No one escapes the wilderness on the way to the promised land.
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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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These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.
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The creative process obtains in all creative acts. So if I'm painting suddenly I'll see something that I didn't see before.
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As a life's work, I would remember everything - everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net.
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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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Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?
Annie Dillard
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The reader's ear must adjust down from loud life to the subtle, imaginary sounds of the written word. An ordinary reader picking up a book can't yet hear a thing it will take half an hour to pick up the writing's modulations, its ups and downs and louds and softs.
Annie Dillard
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If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed.
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At a certain point, you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening.
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