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

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It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping God may wake someday and take offense, or the waking God may draw us out to where we can never return.
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The life of sensation is the life of greed it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less.
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I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.
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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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Old memories are very easy to get except that once you write about something you've destroyed it.
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Nature seems to exult in abounding radicality, extremism, anarchy. If we were to judge nature by its common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed. In nature, improbabilities are the one stock in trade. The whole creation is one lunatic fringe. ... No claims of any and all revelations could be so far-fetched as a single giraffe.
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The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest.
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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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According to Inuit culture in Greenland, a person possesses six or seven souls. The souls take the form of tiny people scattered throughout the body.
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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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I don't know what it is about fecundity that so appalls. I suppose it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonishingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful, and that with extravagance goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives.
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Dan Gerber is one of our finest living poets.
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Whenever there is stillness there is the still small voice, God's speaking from the whirlwind, nature's old song, and dance.
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I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again.
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The sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain. This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is.
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The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.
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Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
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I couldn't unpeach the peaches.
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It should surprise no one that the life of the writer - such as it is - is colorless to the point of sensory deprivation. Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.
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Young children have no sense of wonder. They bewilder well, but few things surprise them. All of it is new to young children, after all, and equally gratuitous.
Annie Dillard