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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.

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

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There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.
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Writers serve as the memory of a people. They chew over our public past.
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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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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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The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.
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As a life's work, I would remember everything - everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net.
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The irrational haunts the metaphysical.
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Our life seems cursed to be a wiggle merely, and a wandering without end.
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There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been.
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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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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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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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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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The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper I cannot quite make it out.
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The mind wants the world to return its love, or its awareness the mind wants to know all the world, and all eternity, and God.
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