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The courage of children and beasts is a function of innocence.

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
Beasts
Beast
Innocence
Function
Courage
Children

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It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave.
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The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.
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What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
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Whenever an encounter between a writer of good will and a regular person of good will happens to touch on the subject of writing, each person discovers, dismayed, that good will is of no earthly use. The conversation cannot proceed.
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An Eskimo shaman said, Life's greatest danger lies in the fact that man's food consists entirely of souls.
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If I actually believed that the progress of human understanding depended on our crop of contemporary novelists, I would shoot myself.
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Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf
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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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I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers.
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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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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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The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.
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Are you living just a little and calling that life?
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The novel is a game or joke shared between author and reader.
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The world knew you before you knew the world.
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Ecstasy, I think, is a soul's response to the waves holiness makes as it nears.
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But enough is enough. One turns at last even from glory itself with a sigh of relief. From the depths of mystery, and even from the heights of splendor, we bounce back and hurry for the latitudes of home.
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As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.
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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.
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The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper I cannot quite make it out.
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