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Old memories are very easy to get except that once you write about something you've destroyed it.

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
Destroyed
Except
Memories
Easy
Write
Writing
Something

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Johnston's books are beautifully written and among the funniest I have ever read.
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For writing a first draft requires from the writer a peculiar internal state which ordinary life does not induce. ... how to set yourself spinning?
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I noticed this process of waking, and predicted with terrifying logic that one of these years not far away I would be awake continuously and never slip back, and never be free of myself again.
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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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No one escapes the wilderness on the way to the promised land.
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Every spring he vowed to quit teaching school, and every summer he missed his pupils and searched for them on the streets.
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One of the few things I know about writing is this: Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book, give it, give it all, give it now.
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We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall.
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I saw in a blue haze all the world poured flat and pale between the mountains
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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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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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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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You can't test courage cautiously, so I ran hard and waved my arms hard, happy.
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We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all.
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By dipping us children in the Bible so often, they hoped, I think, to give our lives a serious tint, and to provide us with quaintly magnificent snatches of prayer to produce as charms while, say, being mugged for our cash or jewels.
Annie Dillard
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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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Geography is the key, the crucial accident of birth. A piece of protein could be a snail, a sea lion, or a systems analyst, but it had to start somewhere. This is not science it is merely metaphor. And the landscape in which the protein starts shapes its end as surely as bowls shape water.
Annie Dillard
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Skin was earth it was soil. I could see, even on my own skin, the joined trapezoids of dust specks God had wetted and stuck with his spit the morning he made Adam from dirt. Now, all these generations later, we people could still see on our skin the inherited prints of the dust specks of Eden.
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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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The surest sign of age is loneliness.
Annie Dillard