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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
Oblivious
Unaware
Layers
Walked
Air
Awareness
History
Littered
Breathed

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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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You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then-and only then-it is handed to you.
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Are you living just a little and calling that life?
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Nature seems to exult in abounding radicality, extremism, anarchy. If we were to judge nature by its common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed. In nature, improbabilities are the one stock in trade. The whole creation is one lunatic fringe. ... No claims of any and all revelations could be so far-fetched as a single giraffe.
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The silence is all there is. It is the alpha and the omega, it is God's brooding over the face of the waters it is the blinded note of the ten thousand things, the whine of wings. You take a step in the right direction to pray to this silence, and even to address the prayer to World. Distinctions blur. Quit your tents. Pray without ceasing.
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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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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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I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too.
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No one escapes the wilderness on the way to the promised land.
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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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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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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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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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These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.
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Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.
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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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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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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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We are here to witness. There is nothing else to do with those mute materials we do not need. Until Larry teaches his stone to talk, until God changes his mind, or until the pagan gods slip back to their hilltop groves, all we can do with the whole inhuman array is watch it.
Annie Dillard