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

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The mind itself is an art object. It is a Mondrian canvas onto whose homemade grids it fits its own preselected products. Our knowledge is contextual and only contextual. Ordering and invention coincide: we call their collaboration knowledge.
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I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again.
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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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The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest.
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I think the dying pray at the last not please, but thank you, as a guest thanks his host at the door.
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You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then-and only then-it is handed to you.
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The novel is a game or joke shared between author and reader.
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Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we sense them.
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There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been.
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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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We are here to witness. There is nothing else to do with those mute materials we do not need. Until Larry teaches his stone to talk, until God changes his mind, or until the pagan gods slip back to their hilltop groves, all we can do with the whole inhuman array is watch it.
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Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand - that of finding workable compromises between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us.
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Nothing on earth is more gladdening than knowing we must roll up our sleeves and move back the boundaries of the humanly possible once more.
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Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.
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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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What is a house but a bigger skin, and a neighborhood map but the world's skin ever expanding?
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These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.
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No one can help you if you're stuck in a work. Only you can figure a way out, because only you can see the work's possibilities.
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I couldn't unpeach the peaches.
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I know only enough of God to want to worship him, by any means ready to hand.
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