Quote

Divinity is not playful. The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensibl e earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and fleet. There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see.

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
Ignore
Holy
Secret
Fleet
Universe
Playful
Power
Jest
Nothing
Solemn
Done
Earnest
Made
Divinity

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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 world knew you before you knew the world.
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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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He judged the instant and let go he flung himself loose into the stars.
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Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don't affair. A fish flashes, then dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much salt. Deer apparently ascend bodily into heaven the brightest oriole fades into leaves.
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Nature's silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block.
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Could two live that way? Could two live under the wild rose, and explore by the pond, so that the smooth mind of each is as everywhere present to the other, and as received and as unchallenged, as falling snow?
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Skin was earth it was soil. I could see, even on my own skin, the joined trapezoids of dust specks God had wetted and stuck with his spit the morning he made Adam from dirt. Now, all these generations later, we people could still see on our skin the inherited prints of the dust specks of Eden.
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Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.
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We are here on the planet only once, and might as well get a feel for the place.
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Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.
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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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The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.
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But enough is enough. One turns at last even from glory itself with a sigh of relief. From the depths of mystery, and even from the heights of splendor, we bounce back and hurry for the latitudes of home.
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I had good innings, as the British say. I wrote for 38 years at the top of my form, and I wanted to quit on a high note.
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I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as a dying friend. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.
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Landscape consists in the multiple, overlapping intricacies and forms that exist in a given space at a moment in time.
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I work mornings only. I go out to lunch. Afternoons I play with the baby, walk with my husband, or shovel mail.
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A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order - willed, faked, and so brought into being.
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Write about winter in the summer.
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