Quote

It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping God may wake someday and take offense, or the waking God may draw us out to where we can never return.

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
Church
Draw
Offense
Straw
May
Wake
Crash
Lashes
Preservers
Issue
Sleeping
Straws
Pews
Take
Draws
Hats
Helmet
Ushers
Never
Wear
Waking
Signal
Flares
Life
Return
Someday
Velvet
Helmets
Issues
Wearing
Signals
Lash
Sleep
Madness
Ladies
Flare

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I have since only rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam.
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Whenever there is stillness there is the still small voice, God's speaking from the whirlwind, nature's old song, and dance.
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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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Landscape consists in the multiple, overlapping intricacies and forms that exist in a given space at a moment in time.
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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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No one escapes the wilderness on the way to the promised land.
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On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away.
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It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.
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Cruelty is a mystery, and a waste of pain.
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I alternate between thinking of the planet as home - dear and familiar stone hearth and garden - and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners.
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Could two live that way? Could two live under the wild rose, and explore by the pond, so that the smooth mind of each is as everywhere present to the other, and as received and as unchallenged, as falling snow?
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Let the grass die. I let almost all of my indoor plants die from neglect while I was writing the book. There are all kinds of ways to live. You can take your choice. You can keep a tidy house, and when St. Peter asks you what you did with your life, you can say, I kept a tidy house, I made my own cheese balls.
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Push it. examine all things intensely and relentlessly.
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Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.
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I think the dying pray at the last not please, but thank you, as a guest thanks his host at the door.
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It could be that our faithlessness is a cowering cowardice born of our very smallness, a massive failure of imagination... If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldnt believe the world existed.
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Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.
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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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A schedule defends from chaos and whim. A net for catching days.
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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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