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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
Switch
Asleep
Fancy
Deeply
Control
Switches

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The irrational haunts the metaphysical.
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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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I noticed this process of waking, and predicted with terrifying logic that one of these years not far away I would be awake continuously and never slip back, and never be free of myself again.
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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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Does anything eat flowers. I couldn't recall having seen anything eat a flower - are they nature's privileged pets?
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The interior life is often stupid.
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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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Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.
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What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
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The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.
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The novel is a game or joke shared between author and reader.
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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 couldn't unpeach the peaches.
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What I call innocence is the spirit's unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once a receptiveness and total concentration.
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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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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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You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it... The vision is not so much destroyed, exactly, as it is, by the time you have finished, forgotten. It has been replaced by this changeling.
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I have since only rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam.
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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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