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

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Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.
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You can serve or you can sing, and wreck your heart in prayer, working the world's hard work.
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Writers serve as the memory of a people. They chew over our public past.
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There is neither a proportional relationship, nor an inverse one, between a writer’s estimation of a work in progress & its actual quality. The feeling that the work is magnificent, & the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged.
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We are here to abet creation and to witness to it, to notice each other's beautiful face and complex nature so that creation need not play to an empty house.
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There is no whit less enlightenment under the tree by your street than there was under the Buddha's bo tree. I invite you to go sit under that tree by your street.
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For all the insularity of the old guard, Pittsburgh was always an open and democratic town.
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Your freedom as a writer is not freedom of expression in the sense of wild blurting you may not let rip. It is life at its most free, if you are fortunate enough to be able to try it, because you select your materials, invent your task, and pace yourself.
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I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too.
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Like any child, I slid into myself perfectly fitted, as a diver meets her reflection in a pool. Her fingertips enter the fingertips on the water, her wrists slide up her arms. The diver wraps herself in her reflection wholly, sealing it at the toes, and wears it as she climbs rising from the pool, and ever after.
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We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall.
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Self-consciousness is the curse of the city and all that sophistication implies.
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Does anything eat flowers. I couldn't recall having seen anything eat a flower - are they nature's privileged pets?
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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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The world is wider in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain and Lazarus.
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The mind of the writer does indeed do something before it dies, and so does its owner, but I would be hard put to call it living.
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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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if you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not.
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People who read are not too lazy to turn on the television they prefer books.
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Ecstasy, I think, is a soul's response to the waves holiness makes as it nears.
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