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Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we sense them.

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
Sense
Performed
Grace
Beauty
Whether

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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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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 breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers.
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The universe is illusion merely, not one speck of it real, and we are not only its victims, falling always into or smashed by a planet slung by the sun-but also its captives, bound by the mineral-made ropes of our senses.
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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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If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed.
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The interior life is often stupid.
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A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.
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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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No one escapes the wilderness on the way to the promised land.
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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.
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The sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain. This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is.
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All my books started out as extravagant and ended up pure and plain.
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She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.
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It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave.
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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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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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You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it to the page. The page is jealous and tyrannical the page is made of time and matter the page always wins.
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What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
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The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.
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