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What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?

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
Triviality
Dying
Persons
Person
Would
Enrage

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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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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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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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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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There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.
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Nothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves.
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Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we sense them.
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Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.
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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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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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Unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous.
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Nothing on earth is more gladdening than knowing we must roll up our sleeves and move back the boundaries of the humanly possible once more.
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poetry has been able to function quite directly as human interpretation of the raw, loose universe. It is a mixture, if you will, of journalism and metaphysics, or of science and religion.
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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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You do what you do out of your private love of the thing itself.
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The mind wants the world to return its love, or its awareness the mind wants to know all the world, and all eternity, and God.
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Nature's silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block.
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if you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not.
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[Insects] are not only cold-blooded, and green- and yellow-blooded, but are also cased in a clacking horn. They have rigid eyes and brains strung down their backs. But they make up the bulk of our comrades-at-life, so I look to them for a glimmer of companionship.
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Write about winter in the summer. Describe Norway as Ibsen did, from a desk in Italy describe Dublin as James Joyce did, from a desk in Paris. Willa Cather wrote her prairie novels in New York City Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn in Hartford, Connecticut. Recently, scholars learned that Walt Whitman rarely left his room.
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