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Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.

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
Surface
Mystery
Life
Tracing
Faint

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The Pulitzer is more useful than meaningful.
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The creative process obtains in all creative acts. So if I'm painting suddenly I'll see something that I didn't see before.
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The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.
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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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I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.
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I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers.
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Nothing on earth is more gladdening than knowing we must roll up our sleeves and move back the boundaries of the humanly possible once more.
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Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.
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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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When I teach, I preach. I thump the Bible. I exhort my students morally. I talk to them about the dedicated life.
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Could two live that way? Could two live under the wild rose, and explore by the pond, so that the smooth mind of each is as everywhere present to the other, and as received and as unchallenged, as falling snow?
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The universe that suckled us is a monster that does not care if we live or die--it does not care if it itself grinds to a halt. It is a beast running on chance and death, careening from nowhere to nowhere. It is fixed and blind, a robot programmed to kill. We are free and seeing we can only try to outwit it at every turn to save our lives.
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She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.
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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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Those of us who read carried around with us like martyrs a secret knowledge, a secret joy, and a secret hope: There is a life worth living where history is still taking place there are ideas worth dying for, and circumstances where courage is still prized.
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Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we sense them.
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Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.
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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.
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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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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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