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No one escapes the wilderness on the way to the promised land.

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
Peaceful
Land
Way
Escapes
Promised
Wilderness

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But enough is enough. One turns at last even from glory itself with a sigh of relief. From the depths of mystery, and even from the heights of splendor, we bounce back and hurry for the latitudes of home.
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I think the dying pray at the last not please, but thank you, as a guest thanks his host at the door.
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The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring.
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Nature seems to exult in abounding radicality, extremism, anarchy. If we were to judge nature by its common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed. In nature, improbabilities are the one stock in trade. The whole creation is one lunatic fringe. ... No claims of any and all revelations could be so far-fetched as a single giraffe.
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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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Novels written with film contracts in mind have a faint but unmistakable, and ruinous, odor.
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A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order - willed, faked, and so brought into being.
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Nothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves.
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Every spring he vowed to quit teaching school, and every summer he missed his pupils and searched for them on the streets.
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No one can help you if you're stuck in a work. Only you can figure a way out, because only you can see the work's possibilities.
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Whenever an encounter between a writer of good will and a regular person of good will happens to touch on the subject of writing, each person discovers, dismayed, that good will is of no earthly use. The conversation cannot proceed.
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I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.
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We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall.
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The Pulitzer is more useful than meaningful.
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I write in my own journal when something extraordinary or funny happens. And there's some nice imagery in there. I don't think of what to do with it.
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Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a word to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and delight, the canary that sings on the skull.
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I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.
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The interior life is often stupid.
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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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Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we sense them.
Annie Dillard