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We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all.

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
Deeply
Control
Switches
Switch
Asleep
Fancy

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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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At night I read and write, and things I have never understood become clear I reap the harvest of the rest of the year's planting
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The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.
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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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As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.
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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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No one can help you if you're stuck in a work. Only you can figure a way out, because only you can see the work's possibilities.
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I don't know what it is about fecundity that so appalls. I suppose it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonishingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful, and that with extravagance goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives.
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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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Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.
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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. It is hard to desecrate a grove and change your mind. The very holy mountains are keeping mum. We doused the burning bush and cannot rekindle it we are lighting matches in vain under every green tree.
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What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
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The universe that suckled us is a monster that does not care if we live or die--it does not care if it itself grinds to a halt. It is a beast running on chance and death, careening from nowhere to nowhere. It is fixed and blind, a robot programmed to kill. We are free and seeing we can only try to outwit it at every turn to save our lives.
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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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The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper I cannot quite make it out.
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I saw in a blue haze all the world poured flat and pale between the mountains
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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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The surest sign of age is loneliness.
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The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.
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Nothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves.
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