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I think the dying pray at the last not please, but thank you, as a guest thanks his host at the door.

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
Doors
Host
Please
Thank
Lasts
Thanks
Last
Pray
Think
Gratitude
Thinking
Praying
Door
Guest
Dying
Guests

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I have since only rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam.
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Write about winter in the summer. Describe Norway as Ibsen did, from a desk in Italy describe Dublin as James Joyce did, from a desk in Paris. Willa Cather wrote her prairie novels in New York City Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn in Hartford, Connecticut. Recently, scholars learned that Walt Whitman rarely left his room.
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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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What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.
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I couldn't unpeach the peaches.
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Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf
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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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What is a house but a bigger skin, and a neighborhood map but the world's skin ever expanding?
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The mind itself is an art object ... The mind is a blue guitar on which we improvise the song of the world.
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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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poetry has been able to function quite directly as human interpretation of the raw, loose universe. It is a mixture, if you will, of journalism and metaphysics, or of science and religion.
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Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we sense them.
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God gave me a talent to draw. I 'owed' it to him to develop the talent.
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Having chosen this foolishness, I was a free being. How could the world ever stop me, how could I betray myself, if I was not afraid?
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The universe that suckled us is a monster that does not care if we live or die--it does not care if it itself grinds to a halt. It is a beast running on chance and death, careening from nowhere to nowhere. It is fixed and blind, a robot programmed to kill. We are free and seeing we can only try to outwit it at every turn to save our lives.
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Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me. This is easy to write, easy to read, and hard to believe.
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Today is one of those excellent January partly cloudies in which light chooses an unexpected part of the landscape to trick out in gilt, and then the shadow sweeps it away. You know you're alive. You take huge steps, trying to feel the planet's roundness arc between your feet.
Annie Dillard
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Could two live that way? Could two live under the wild rose, and explore by the pond, so that the smooth mind of each is as everywhere present to the other, and as received and as unchallenged, as falling snow?
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if you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not.
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The Pulitzer is more useful than meaningful.
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