Quote

When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner's pick, a wood carver's gouge, a surgeon's probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year.

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
Lines
Soon
Surgeons
Digs
Years
Year
Follow
Wood
Carver
Time
Words
Subjects
Territory
Miner
Write
Line
Lays
Probe
Next
Deep
Woods
Wield
Ends
Tomorrow
Pick
Located
Find
Dead
Picks
Miners
Real
Path
Subject
Surgeon
Gouge

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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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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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Nature's silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block.
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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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Landscape consists in the multiple, overlapping intricacies and forms that exist in a given space at a moment in time.
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We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us.
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Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.
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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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There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world lit or unlit as the light allows. When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it?
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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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Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don't affair. A fish flashes, then dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much salt. Deer apparently ascend bodily into heaven the brightest oriole fades into leaves.
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Dan Gerber is one of our finest living poets.
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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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I woke at intervals until . . . the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not.
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The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.
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You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it... The vision is not so much destroyed, exactly, as it is, by the time you have finished, forgotten. It has been replaced by this changeling.
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All my books started out as extravagant and ended up pure and plain.
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You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then-and only then-it is handed to you.
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Just think: in all the clean, beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a blot our planet alone has death.
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Divinity is not playful. The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensibl e earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and fleet. There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see.
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