Quote

The universe is illusion merely, not one speck of it real, and we are not only its victims, falling always into or smashed by a planet slung by the sun-but also its captives, bound by the mineral-made ropes of our senses.

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
Planets
Bound
Ropes
Sun
Falling
Speck
Universe
Bounds
Smashed
Fall
Senses
Specks
Also
Victim
Captives
Real
Planet
Minerals
Made
Illusion
Rope
Slung
Always
Merely
Victims
Mineral

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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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Last forever!' Who hasn't prayed that prayer? You were lucky to get it in the first place. The present is a freely given canvas. That it is constantly being ripped apart and washed downstream goes without saying.
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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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Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you.
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The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.
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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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The way to learn about a writer is to read the text. Or texts.
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What have we been doing all these centuries but trying to call God back to the mountain, or, failing that, raise a peep out of anything that isn't us? What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are not they both saying: Hello? We spy on whales and on interstellar radio objects we starve ourselves and pray till we're blue.
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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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I cannot cause light the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam.
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Does anything eat flowers. I couldn't recall having seen anything eat a flower - are they nature's privileged pets?
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Cruelty is a mystery, and a waste of pain.
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Today is one of those excellent January partly cloudies in which light chooses an unexpected part of the landscape to trick out in gilt, and then the shadow sweeps it away. You know you're alive. You take huge steps, trying to feel the planet's roundness arc between your feet.
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You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then-and only then-it is handed to you.
Annie Dillard
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All my books started out as extravagant and ended up pure and plain.
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[Insects] are not only cold-blooded, and green- and yellow-blooded, but are also cased in a clacking horn. They have rigid eyes and brains strung down their backs. But they make up the bulk of our comrades-at-life, so I look to them for a glimmer of companionship.
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I can't dance anymore. Total knee replacements. I can't do anything anymore.
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Johnston's books are beautifully written and among the funniest I have ever read.
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We live in all we seek. The hidden shows up in too-plain sight. It lives captive on the face of the obvious - the people, events, and things of the day - to which we as sophisticated children have long since become oblivious. What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.
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Caring passionately about something isn't against nature, and it isn't against human nature. It's what we're here to do.
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