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

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A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order - willed, faked, and so brought into being.
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When you write, you lay out a line of words. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory.
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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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The way to learn about a writer is to read the text. Or texts.
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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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Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation's short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit.
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The irrational haunts the metaphysical.
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It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave. It is hard to desecrate a grove and change your mind. The very holy mountains are keeping mum. We doused the burning bush and cannot rekindle it we are lighting matches in vain under every green tree.
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Write about winter in the summer.
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I am a fugitive and a vagabond, a sojourner seeking signs.
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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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Every spring he vowed to quit teaching school, and every summer he missed his pupils and searched for them on the streets.
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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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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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At night I read and write, and things I have never understood become clear I reap the harvest of the rest of the year's planting
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I break up through the skin of awareness a thousand times a day, as dolphins burst through seas, and dive again, and rise, and dive.
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It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as separating us from our creator, our very self-consciousness, is also the one thing that divides us from our fellow creatures. It was a bitter birthday present from evolution.
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About five years ago I saw a mockingbird make a straight vertical descent from the roof gutter of a four-story building. It was an act as careless and spontaneous as the curl of a stem or the kindling of a star.
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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.
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