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Even if things are as bad as they could possible be, and as meaningless, then matters of truth are themselves indifferent we may as well please our sensibilities and, with as much spirit as we can muster, go out with a buck and a wing.

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
Wells
Meaningless
Sensibilities
Well
Wings
Buck
Matter
Matters
Muster
Even
Please
Existentialism
Much
Possible
Bucks
Things
Spirit
Wing
Truth
Sensibility
May
Indifferent

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why did I have to keep learning this same thing over and over?
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The courage of children and beasts is a function of innocence.
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I wake up thinking: What am I reading? What will I read next? I'm terrified that I'll run out, that I will read through all I want to, and be forced to learn wildflowers at last, to keep awake.
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I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.
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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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Just think: in all the clean, beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a blot our planet alone has death.
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The sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain. This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is.
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I am a fugitive and a vagabond, a sojourner seeking signs.
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Old memories are very easy to get except that once you write about something you've destroyed it.
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If we listened to our intellect, we’d never have a love affair... or go into business. You’ve got to jump off cliffs and build your wings on the way down.
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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 teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up. We teach our children to look alive there, to join by words and activities the life of human culture on the planet
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You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it to the page. The page is jealous and tyrannical the page is made of time and matter the page always wins.
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Like everyone in his right mind, I feared Santa Claus.
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Write about winter in the summer. Describe Norway as Ibsen did, from a desk in Italy describe Dublin as James Joyce did, from a desk in Paris. Willa Cather wrote her prairie novels in New York City Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn in Hartford, Connecticut. Recently, scholars learned that Walt Whitman rarely left his room.
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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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Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me. This is easy to write, easy to read, and hard to believe.
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There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by.
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What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
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Buddhism notes that it is always a mistake to think your soul can go it alone.
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