Quote

I have since only rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam.

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
Since
Rarely
Moment
Mostly
Spate
Comes
Mountain
Roars
Moments
Tree
Slam
Light
Goes
Crack
Live
Vision
Cracks
Seen
Lights
Open
Mountains

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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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Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?
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She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.
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The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.
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I never met a man who was shaken by a field of identical blades of grass. An acre of poppies and a forest of spruce boggle no one's mind.
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It could be that our faithlessness is a cowering cowardice born of our very smallness, a massive failure of imagination... If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldnt believe the world existed.
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Theirs is the mystery of continuous creation and all that providence implies: the uncertainty of vision, the horror of the fixed, the dissolution of the present, the intricacy of beauty, the pressure of fecundity, the elusiveness of the free, and the flawed nature of perfection.
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Your feelings are none of your business.
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The body of literature, with its limits and edges, exists outside some people and inside others. Only after the writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature.
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I saw in a blue haze all the world poured flat and pale between the mountains
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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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I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers.
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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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The mind of the writer does indeed do something before it dies, and so does its owner, but I would be hard put to call it living.
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I couldn't unpeach the peaches.
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Private life, book life, took place where words met imagination without passing through the world.
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Are you living just a little and calling that life?
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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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If I actually believed that the progress of human understanding depended on our crop of contemporary novelists, I would shoot myself.
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I am sorry I ran from you. I am still running, running from that knowledge, that eye, that love from which there is no refuge. For you meant only love, and love, and I felt only fear, and pain. So once in Israel love came to us incarnate, stood in the doorway between two worlds, and we were all afraid.
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