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

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper I cannot quite make it out.
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I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers.
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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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What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.
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A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.
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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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Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.
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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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The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest.
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Skin was earth it was soil. I could see, even on my own skin, the joined trapezoids of dust specks God had wetted and stuck with his spit the morning he made Adam from dirt. Now, all these generations later, we people could still see on our skin the inherited prints of the dust specks of Eden.
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The creatures I seek do not want to be seen.
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It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.
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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.
Annie Dillard
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Time is the continuous loop, the snakeskin with scales endlessly overlapping without beginning or end, or time is an ascending spiral if you will, like a child's toy Slinky.
Annie Dillard
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We are here on the planet only once, and might as well get a feel for the place.
Annie Dillard
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I wake expectant, hoping to see a new thing.
Annie Dillard
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It makes more sense to write one big book - a novel or nonfiction narrative - than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all you possess and learn.
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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.
Annie Dillard
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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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We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet.
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