Quote

Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf

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
Curved
Mystery
Tracing
Face
Miners
Faces
Tunnels
Life
Faint
Like
Leafs
Leaf
Idle

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We are here on the planet only once, and might as well get a feel for the place.
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We live in all we seek.
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There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world lit or unlit as the light allows. When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it?
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It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale.
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Landscape consists in the multiple, overlapping intricacies and forms that exist in a given space at a moment in time.
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Fiction keeps its audience by retaining the world as its subject matter. People like the world. Many people actually prefer it to art and spend their days by choice in the thick of it.
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There are no events but thoughts and the heart's hard turning, the heart's slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times.
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I'd seen a great many partial eclipses, but a partial eclipse has the same relation to a total eclipse as flirting with a man does to marrying him. It's completely different.
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The painter... does not fit the paints to the world. He most certainly does not fit the world to himself. He fits himself to the paint. The self is the servant who bears the paintbox and its inherited contents.
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The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.
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Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.
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Make connections let rip and dance where you can.
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We are here to witness the creation and to abet it.
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Time is the continuous loop, the snakeskin with scales endlessly overlapping without beginning or end, or time is an ascending spiral if you will, like a child's toy Slinky.
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I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers.
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It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.
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For all the insularity of the old guard, Pittsburgh was always an open and democratic town.
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Just once I wanted a task that required all the joy I had. Day after day I had noticed that if I waited long enough, my strong unexpressed joy would dwindle and dissipate inside me, like a fire subsiding . . . . Just this once I wanted to let it rip.
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I worked so hard all my life, and all I want to do now is read.
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Johnston's books are beautifully written and among the funniest I have ever read.
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