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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.

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
Still
Knowledge
Carried
Ideas
Read
Circumstances
Life
Hope
Dying
Like
Living
Courage
History
Taking
Place
Worth
Prized
Around
Joy
Martyrs
Stills
Secret
Martyr

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if you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not.
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Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you.
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Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.
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Johnston's books are beautifully written and among the funniest I have ever read.
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I write in my own journal when something extraordinary or funny happens. And there's some nice imagery in there. I don't think of what to do with it.
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I couldn't unpeach the peaches.
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The interior life is often stupid.
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When I first read the words 'introvert' and 'extrovert' when I was 10, I thought I was both.
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She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.
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It makes more sense to write one big book - a novel or nonfiction narrative - than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all you possess and learn.
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We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence.
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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.
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The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring.
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When I teach, I preach. I thump the Bible. I exhort my students morally. I talk to them about the dedicated life.
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I don't know what it is about fecundity that so appalls. I suppose it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonishingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful, and that with extravagance goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives.
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The Pulitzer is more useful than meaningful.
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I'm a housewife: I spend far more time on housework than anything else.
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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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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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As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.
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