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What I call innocence is the spirit's unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once a receptiveness and total concentration.

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
Pure
Receptiveness
Call
Concentration
State
Devotion
Moment
Innocence
Spirit
Total
Moments
Object
States
Conscious
Objects

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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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The creatures I seek do not want to be seen.
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Nature's silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block.
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Dan Gerber is one of our finest living poets.
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You do what you do out of your private love of the thing itself.
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I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.
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Fiction keeps its audience by retaining the world as its subject matter. People like the world. Many people actually prefer it to art and spend their days by choice in the thick of it.
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Crystals grew inside rock like arithmetic flowers. They lengthened and spread, added plane to plane in an awed and perfect obedience to an absolute geometry that even stones - maybe only the stones - understood.
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We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet.
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if you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not.
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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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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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The way we live our days, is the way we live our lives.
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The dear, stupid body is as easily satisfied as a spaniel.
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The universe that suckled us is a monster that does not care if we live or die--it does not care if it itself grinds to a halt. It is a beast running on chance and death, careening from nowhere to nowhere. It is fixed and blind, a robot programmed to kill. We are free and seeing we can only try to outwit it at every turn to save our lives.
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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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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 dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.
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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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Novels written with film contracts in mind have a faint but unmistakable, and ruinous, odor.
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