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I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers.

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
Awareness
History
Littered
Breathed
Oblivious
Unaware
Layers
Walked
Air

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At a certain point, you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening.
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The way to learn about a writer is to read the text. Or texts.
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Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.
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One of the few things I know about writing is this: Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book, give it, give it all, give it now.
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The creative process obtains in all creative acts. So if I'm painting suddenly I'll see something that I didn't see before.
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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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The Pulitzer is more useful than meaningful.
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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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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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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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You can't test courage cautiously.
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Admire the world for never ending on you -- as you would an opponent, without taking your eyes away from him, or walking away.
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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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Painters work from the ground up. The latest version of a painting overlays earlier versions, and obliterates them. Writers, on the other hand, work from left to right. The discardable chapters are on the left.
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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 madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping God may wake someday and take offense, or the waking God may draw us out to where we can never return.
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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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I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again.
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The sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain. This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is.
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It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.
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