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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
Unaware
Layers
Walked
Air
Awareness
Littered
History
Breathed
Oblivious

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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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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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What have we been doing all these centuries but trying to call God back to the mountain, or, failing that, raise a peep out of anything that isn't us? What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are not they both saying: Hello? We spy on whales and on interstellar radio objects we starve ourselves and pray till we're blue.
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There is neither a proportional relationship, nor an inverse one, between a writer’s estimation of a work in progress & its actual quality. The feeling that the work is magnificent, & the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged.
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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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On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away.
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The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper I cannot quite make it out.
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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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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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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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The Pulitzer is more useful than meaningful.
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Just once I wanted a task that required all the joy I had. Day after day I had noticed that if I waited long enough, my strong unexpressed joy would dwindle and dissipate inside me, like a fire subsiding . . . . Just this once I wanted to let it rip.
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I saw in a blue haze all the world poured flat and pale between the mountains
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Geography is the key, the crucial accident of birth. A piece of protein could be a snail, a sea lion, or a systems analyst, but it had to start somewhere. This is not science it is merely metaphor. And the landscape in which the protein starts shapes its end as surely as bowls shape water.
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What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.
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According to Inuit culture in Greenland, a person possesses six or seven souls. The souls take the form of tiny people scattered throughout the body.
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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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The novel is a game or joke shared between author and reader.
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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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Books swept me away, this way and that, one after the other I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them.
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