Quote

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

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
Planting
Night
Reap
Become
Harvest
Writing
Understood
Years
Rest
Things
Year
Never
Clear
Read

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Are you living just a little and calling that life?
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Our family was on the lunatic fringe. My mother was always completely irrepressible. My father made crowd noises into a microphone.
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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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The real and proper question is: why is it beautiful?
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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 more you read, the more you will write. The better the stuff you read, the better the stuff you will write.
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At a certain point, you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening.
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I would like to live. . . open to time and death painlessly, noticing everything, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will.
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Cruelty is a mystery, and a waste of pain.
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What have we been doing all these centuries but trying to call God back to the mountain, or, failing that, raise a peep out of anything that isn't us? What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are not they both saying: Hello? We spy on whales and on interstellar radio objects we starve ourselves and pray till we're blue.
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The courage of children and beasts is a function of innocence.
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The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.
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On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away.
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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.
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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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I cannot cause light the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam.
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I know only enough of God to want to worship him, by any means ready to hand.
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Admire the world for never ending on you -- as you would an opponent, without taking your eyes away from him, or walking away.
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We are here to witness. There is nothing else to do with those mute materials we do not need. Until Larry teaches his stone to talk, until God changes his mind, or until the pagan gods slip back to their hilltop groves, all we can do with the whole inhuman array is watch it.
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Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.
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