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

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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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By dipping us children in the Bible so often, they hoped, I think, to give our lives a serious tint, and to provide us with quaintly magnificent snatches of prayer to produce as charms while, say, being mugged for our cash or jewels.
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Does anything eat flowers. I couldn't recall having seen anything eat a flower - are they nature's privileged pets?
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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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I saw in a blue haze all the world poured flat and pale between the mountains
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What is important is the moment of opening a life and feeling it touch--with an electric hiss and cry--this speckled mineral sphere, our present world.
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The way we live our days, is the way we live our lives.
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All my books started out as extravagant and ended up pure and plain.
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The surest sign of age is loneliness.
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What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
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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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What I call innocence is the spirit's unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once a receptiveness and total concentration.
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The point of going somewhere like the Napo River in Ecuador is not to see the most spectacular anything. It is simply to see what is there.
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Doing something does not require discipline. It creates its own discipline - with a little help from caffeine.
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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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Crystals grew inside rock like arithmetic flowers. They lengthened and spread, added plane to plane in an awed and perfect obedience to an absolute geometry that even stones - maybe only the stones - understood.
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I alternate between thinking of the planet as home - dear and familiar stone hearth and garden - and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners.
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It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave.
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Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.
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A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.
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