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Unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous.

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
Men
Mass
Unless
Grace
Beauty
Gratuitous
Race
Deluded
Age
Races
Seems
Wholly
Thing
Ages

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Ecstasy, I think, is a soul's response to the waves holiness makes as it nears.
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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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No, the point is not only does time fly and do we die, but that in these reckless conditions we live at all, and are vouchsafed, for the duration of certain inexplicable moments, to know it.
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She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.
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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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Crystals grew inside rock like arithmetic flowers. They lengthened and spread, added plane to plane in an awed and perfect obedience to an absolute geometry that even stones - maybe only the stones - understood.
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God gave me a talent to draw. I 'owed' it to him to develop the talent.
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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.
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Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.
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I can't dance anymore. Total knee replacements. I can't do anything anymore.
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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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He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write. He is careful of what he learns, for that is what he will know.
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The soul may ask God for anything, and never fail.
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The surest sign of age is loneliness.
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Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?
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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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A schedule defends from chaos and whim. A net for catching days.
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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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I break up through the skin of awareness a thousand times a day, as dolphins burst through seas, and dive again, and rise, and dive.
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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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