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

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Just think: in all the clean, beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a blot our planet alone has death.
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I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers.
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We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet.
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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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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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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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No child on earth was ever meant to be ordinary, and you can see it in them, and they know it, too, but then the times get to them, and the wear out their brains learning what folks expect, and spend their strength trying to rise over those same folks.
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For writing a first draft requires from the writer a peculiar internal state which ordinary life does not induce. ... how to set yourself spinning?
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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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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 reader's ear must adjust down from loud life to the subtle, imaginary sounds of the written word. An ordinary reader picking up a book can't yet hear a thing it will take half an hour to pick up the writing's modulations, its ups and downs and louds and softs.
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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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When I first read the words 'introvert' and 'extrovert' when I was 10, I thought I was both.
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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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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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People who take photographs during their whole vacation won't remember their vacation. They'll only remember what photographs they took.
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The mind itself is an art object ... The mind is a blue guitar on which we improvise the song of the world.
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Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand - that of finding workable compromises between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us.
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Johnston's books are beautifully written and among the funniest I have ever read.
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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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