Quote

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.

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
Heaven
Flash
Ascend
Eye
Salt
Dissolves
Water
Unfortunately
Flashes
Nature
Fish
Brightest
Much
Fishes
Bodily
Like
Affair
Deer
Leaves
Fades
Eyes
Apparently

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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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Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.
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If you're going to publish a book, you probably are going to make a fool of yourself.
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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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You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then-and only then-it is handed to you.
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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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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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I'm a housewife: I spend far more time on housework than anything else.
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What is important is the moment of opening a life and feeling it touch--with an electric hiss and cry--this speckled mineral sphere, our present world.
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I work mornings only. I go out to lunch. Afternoons I play with the baby, walk with my husband, or shovel mail.
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The interior life is often stupid.
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By dipping us children in the Bible so often, they hoped, I think, to give our lives a serious tint, and to provide us with quaintly magnificent snatches of prayer to produce as charms while, say, being mugged for our cash or jewels.
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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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The body of literature, with its limits and edges, exists outside some people and inside others. Only after the writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature.
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Write about winter in the summer.
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Don't save something good for a later place. Don't hold back from your students, from the poor, don't try to keep anything for yourself 'cause it'll turn to ashes.
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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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Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand - that of finding workable compromises between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us.
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I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as a dying friend. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.
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Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.
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