Quote

Just once I wanted a task that required all the joy I had. Day after day I had noticed that if I waited long enough, my strong unexpressed joy would dwindle and dissipate inside me, like a fire subsiding . . . . Just this once I wanted to let it rip.

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
Enough
Required
Long
Task
Would
Tasks
Dwindle
Like
Inside
Unexpressed
Joy
Dissipate
Fire
Rip
Strong
Waited
Wanted
Noticed

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People who read are not too lazy to turn on the television they prefer books.
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No, the point is not only does time fly and do we die, but that in these reckless conditions we live at all, and are vouchsafed, for the duration of certain inexplicable moments, to know it.
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I wake expectant, hoping to see a new thing.
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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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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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Just think: in all the clean, beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a blot our planet alone has death.
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I woke at intervals until . . . the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not.
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poetry has been able to function quite directly as human interpretation of the raw, loose universe. It is a mixture, if you will, of journalism and metaphysics, or of science and religion.
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The way to learn about a writer is to read the text. Or texts.
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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.
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You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it... The vision is not so much destroyed, exactly, as it is, by the time you have finished, forgotten. It has been replaced by this changeling.
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When you write, you lay out a line of words. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory.
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Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.
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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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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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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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We are here on the planet only once, and might as well get a feel for the place.
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Nature seems to exult in abounding radicality, extremism, anarchy. If we were to judge nature by its common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed. In nature, improbabilities are the one stock in trade. The whole creation is one lunatic fringe. ... No claims of any and all revelations could be so far-fetched as a single giraffe.
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Nothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves.
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