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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.

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
Failure
Cowering
Imagination
Smallness
Common
Likelihood
Born
Cowardice
Sense
Existed
Nature
Massive
Believe
Judge
World
Judging
Faithlessness

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I had been chipping at the world idly, and had by accident uncovered vast and labyrinthine further worlds within it.
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You do what you do out of your private love of the thing itself.
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Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.
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I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.
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There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been.
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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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An Inuit hunter asked the local missionary priest: If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell? No, said the priest, not if you did not know. Then why, asked the Inuit earnestly, did you tell me?
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Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation's short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit.
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I wake up thinking: What am I reading? What will I read next? I'm terrified that I'll run out, that I will read through all I want to, and be forced to learn wildflowers at last, to keep awake.
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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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I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you.
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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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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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We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us.
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Our life seems cursed to be a wiggle merely, and a wandering without end.
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How you spend your days is how you spend your life.
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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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I wake expectant, hoping to see a new thing.
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Last forever!' Who hasn't prayed that prayer? You were lucky to get it in the first place. The present is a freely given canvas. That it is constantly being ripped apart and washed downstream goes without saying.
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There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by.
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