Quote

At a certain point, you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening.

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
Certain
Sea
World
Mountain
Empty
Listening
Attentive
Ready
Wholly
Stop
Mountains
Waiting
Woods
Point
Wait

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Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we sense them.
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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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The mind wants the world to return its love, or its awareness the mind wants to know all the world, and all eternity, and God.
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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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Doing something does not require discipline. It creates its own discipline - with a little help from caffeine.
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I'd seen a great many partial eclipses, but a partial eclipse has the same relation to a total eclipse as flirting with a man does to marrying him. It's completely different.
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Push it. examine all things intensely and relentlessly.
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Are you living just a little and calling that life?
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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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It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave. It is hard to desecrate a grove and change your mind. The very holy mountains are keeping mum. We doused the burning bush and cannot rekindle it we are lighting matches in vain under every green tree.
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Experiencing the present purely is being empty and hollow you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.
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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 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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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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For all the insularity of the old guard, Pittsburgh was always an open and democratic town.
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The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring.
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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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Does anything eat flowers. I couldn't recall having seen anything eat a flower - are they nature's privileged pets?
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The reader's ear must adjust down from loud life to the subtle, imaginary sounds of the written word. An ordinary reader picking up a book can't yet hear a thing it will take half an hour to pick up the writing's modulations, its ups and downs and louds and softs.
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