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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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Almost all of my many passionate interests, and my many changes of mind, came through books. Books prompted the many vows I made to myself.
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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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Push it. examine all things intensely and relentlessly.
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The more you read, the more you will write. The better the stuff you read, the better the stuff you will write.
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Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a word to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and delight, the canary that sings on the skull.
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A schedule defends from chaos and whim. A net for catching days.
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I saw in a blue haze all the world poured flat and pale between the mountains
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There must be bands of enthusiasts for everything on earth-fanatics who shared a vocabulary, a batch of technical skills and equipment, and, perhaps, a vision of some single slice of the beauty and mystery of things, of their complexity, fascination, and unexpectedness.
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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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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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Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
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I cannot cause light the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam.
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Young children have no sense of wonder. They bewilder well, but few things surprise them. All of it is new to young children, after all, and equally gratuitous.
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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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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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When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner's pick, a wood carver's gouge, a surgeon's probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year.
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Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.
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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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Cruelty is a mystery, and a waste of pain.
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The surest sign of age is loneliness.
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