Quote

An Eskimo shaman said, Life's greatest danger lies in the fact that man's food consists entirely of souls.

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
Food
Greatest
Eskimo
Lying
Shaman
Fact
Consists
Facts
Entirely
Soul
Souls
Men
Lies
Life
Danger

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Like any child, I slid into myself perfectly fitted, as a diver meets her reflection in a pool. Her fingertips enter the fingertips on the water, her wrists slide up her arms. The diver wraps herself in her reflection wholly, sealing it at the toes, and wears it as she climbs rising from the pool, and ever after.
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Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?
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I can't dance anymore. Total knee replacements. I can't do anything anymore.
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The silence is all there is. It is the alpha and the omega, it is God's brooding over the face of the waters it is the blinded note of the ten thousand things, the whine of wings. You take a step in the right direction to pray to this silence, and even to address the prayer to World. Distinctions blur. Quit your tents. Pray without ceasing.
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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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As a life's work, I would remember everything - everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net.
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Those of us who read carried around with us like martyrs a secret knowledge, a secret joy, and a secret hope: There is a life worth living where history is still taking place there are ideas worth dying for, and circumstances where courage is still prized.
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It makes more sense to write one big book - a novel or nonfiction narrative - than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all you possess and learn.
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The body of literature, with its limits and edges, exists outside some people and inside others. Only after the writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature.
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Doing something does not require discipline. It creates its own discipline - with a little help from caffeine.
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I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.
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Your freedom as a writer is not freedom of expression in the sense of wild blurting you may not let rip. It is life at its most free, if you are fortunate enough to be able to try it, because you select your materials, invent your task, and pace yourself.
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She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.
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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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I wake expectant, hoping to see a new thing.
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When I first read the words 'introvert' and 'extrovert' when I was 10, I thought I was both.
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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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The real and proper question is: why is it beautiful?
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Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.
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