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Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a word to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and delight, the canary that sings on the skull.

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
Long
Joy
Sings
Things
Game
Brutes
Canary
World
Games
Compass
Canaries
Word
Describe
Bump
Suffering
Cruelty
Skull
Pain
Delight
Brute
Another
Waste
Skulls
Power
Mystery
Bumps

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It should surprise no one that the life of the writer - such as it is - is colorless to the point of sensory deprivation. Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.
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People who read are not too lazy to turn on the television they prefer books.
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Write about winter in the summer. Describe Norway as Ibsen did, from a desk in Italy describe Dublin as James Joyce did, from a desk in Paris. Willa Cather wrote her prairie novels in New York City Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn in Hartford, Connecticut. Recently, scholars learned that Walt Whitman rarely left his room.
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There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world lit or unlit as the light allows. When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it?
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Nothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves.
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Don't save something good for a later place. Don't hold back from your students, from the poor, don't try to keep anything for yourself 'cause it'll turn to ashes.
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These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.
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Our life seems cursed to be a wiggle merely, and a wandering without end.
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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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Dan Gerber is one of our finest living poets.
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The Pulitzer is more useful than meaningful.
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I would like to live. . . open to time and death painlessly, noticing everything, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will.
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If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed.
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But enough is enough. One turns at last even from glory itself with a sigh of relief. From the depths of mystery, and even from the heights of splendor, we bounce back and hurry for the latitudes of home.
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Novels written with film contracts in mind have a faint but unmistakable, and ruinous, odor.
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Writers serve as the memory of a people. They chew over our public past.
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I had been chipping at the world idly, and had by accident uncovered vast and labyrinthine further worlds within it.
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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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You can't test courage cautiously, so I ran hard and waved my arms hard, happy.
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We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us.
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