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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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There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.
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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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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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You can't test courage cautiously.
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For all the insularity of the old guard, Pittsburgh was always an open and democratic town.
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The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.
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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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Painters work from the ground up. The latest version of a painting overlays earlier versions, and obliterates them. Writers, on the other hand, work from left to right. The discardable chapters are on the left.
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Time is the warp and matter the weft of the woven texture of beauty in space, and death is the hurling shuttle.
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Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?
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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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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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Experiencing the present purely is being empty and hollow you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.
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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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What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
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Let the grass die. I let almost all of my indoor plants die from neglect while I was writing the book. There are all kinds of ways to live. You can take your choice. You can keep a tidy house, and when St. Peter asks you what you did with your life, you can say, I kept a tidy house, I made my own cheese balls.
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Novels written with film contracts in mind have a faint but unmistakable, and ruinous, odor.
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A schedule defends from chaos and whim. A net for catching days.
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All my books started out as extravagant and ended up pure and plain.
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