|
0af1e26
|
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.
|
|
life
sojourn
|
Annie Dillard |
|
28b86ea
|
Out of a human population on earth of four and a half billion, perhaps twenty people can write a book in a year. Some people lift cars, too. Some people enter week-long sled-dog races, go over Niagara Falls in a barrel, fly planes through the Arc de Triomphe. Some people feel no pain in childbirth. Some people eat cars. There is no call to take human extremes as norms.
|
|
|
Annie Dillard |
|
8e4a754
|
Push it. examine all things intensely and relentlessly.
|
|
|
Annie Dillard |
|
619d156
|
A work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight. It is barely domesticated, a mustang on which you one day fastened a halter, but which now you cannot catch. It is a lion you cage in your study. As the work grows, it gets harder to control; it is a lion growing in strength. You must visit it every day and reassert your mastery over it. If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the door to its r..
|
|
|
Annie Dillard |
|
0bd748d
|
Admire the world for never ending on you -- as you would an opponent, without taking your eyes away from him, or walking away.
|
|
|
Annie Dillard |
|
e4d1daa
|
We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence...
|
|
|
Annie Dillard |
|
219f434
|
I had been chipping at the world idly, and had by accident uncovered vast and labyrinthine further worlds within it.
|
|
|
Annie Dillard |
|
1ea3283
|
I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you're going no matter how you live, cannot you part.
|
|
humor
inspirational
weasels
nature-writing
essays
|
Annie Dillard |
|
e3f3d1e
|
if you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not.
|
|
|
Annie Dillard |
|
39ff76f
|
I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam. It is possible, in deep space, to sail on solar wind. Light, be it particle or wave, has force: you can rig a giant sail and go. The secret of seeing is to sail on solar wind. Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff
|
|
|
Annie Dillard |
|
86a8792
|
So the Midwest nourishes us [...] and presents us with the spectacle of a land and a people completed and certain. And so we run to our bedrooms and read in a fever, and love the big hardwood trees outside the windows, and the terrible Midwest summers, and the terrible Midwest winters [...]. And so we leave it sorrowfully, having grown strong and restless by opposing with all our will and mind and muscle its simple, loving, single will for ..
|
|
|
Annie Dillard |
|
0cb31ce
|
I wake up thinking: What am I reading? What will I read next? I'm terrified that I'll run out, that I will read through all I want to, and be forced to learn wildflowers at last, to keep awake.
|
|
|
Annie Dillard |
|
e699784
|
Whenever there is stillness there is the still small voice, God's speaking from the whirlwind, nature's old song, and dance...
|
|
stillness
|
Annie Dillard |
|
473714d
|
Today is one of those excellent January partly cloudies in which light chooses an unexpected part of the landscape to trick out in gilt, and then the shadow sweeps it away. You know you're alive. You take huge steps, trying to feel the planet's roundness arc between your feet.
|
|
nature
landscape
walking
|
Annie Dillard |
|
d4f8ca3
|
I cannot imagine a sorrier pursuit than struggling for years to write a book that attempts to appeal to people who do not read in the first place.
|
|
|
Annie Dillard |
|
0569511
|
It's about waking up. A child wakes up over and over again, and notices that she's living. She dreams along, loving the exuberant life
|
|
|
Annie Dillard |
|
c1eb8f6
|
What have we been doing all these centuries but trying to call God back to the mountain, or, failing that, raise a peep out of anything that isn't us? What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are not they both saying: Hello? We spy on whales and on interstellar radio objects; we starve ourselves and pray till we're blue.
|
|
nature
life
listening
|
Annie Dillard |
|
41a6557
|
The written word is weak. Many people prefer life to it. Life gets your blood going, & it smells good. Writing is mere writing, literature is mere. It appeals only to the subtlest senses--the imagination's vision, & the imagination's hearing--& the moral sense, & the intellect. This writing that you do, that so thrills you, that so rocks & exhilarates you, as if you were dancing next to the band, is barely audible to anyone else.
|
|
|
Annie Dillard |
|
c911ce3
|
I used to have a cat, an old fighting tom, who would jump through the open window by my bed in the middle of the night and land on my chest. I'd half-awaken. He'd stick his skull under my nose and purr, stinking of urine and blood. Some nights he kneaded my bare chest with his front paws, powerfully, arching his back, as if sharpening his claws, or pummeling a mother for milk. And some mornings I'd wake in daylight to find my body covered w..
|
|
|
Annie Dillard |
|
1d17803
|
I feel as though I stand at the foot of an infinitely high staircase, down which some exuberant spirit is flinging tennis ball after tennis ball, eternally, and the one thing I want in the world is a tennis ball.
|
|
|
Annie Dillard |
|
89142e8
|
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.
|
|
|
Annie Dillard |
|
1366efb
|
The world is wider in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain and Lazarus.
|
|
|
Annie Dillard |
|
e88e31d
|
All the green in the planted world consists of these whole, rounded chloroplasts wending their ways in water. If you analyze a molecule of chlorophyll itself, what you get is one hundred thirty-six atoms of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen arranged in an exact and complex relationship around a central ring. At the ring's center is a single atom of magnesium. Now: If you remove the atom of magnesium and in its exact place put an atom o..
|
|
|
Annie Dillard |
|
5bbd76f
|
why did I have to keep learning this same thing over and over?
|
|
|
Annie Dillard |
|
14c0836
|
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.
|
|
|
Annie Dillard |
|
e0f4f97
|
Having chosen this foolishness, I was a free being. How could the world ever stop me, how could I betray myself, if I was not afraid?
|
|
|
Annie Dillard |
|
05e63be
|
We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up. We teach our children to look alive there, to join by words and activities the life of human culture on this planet's crust. As adults we are almost all adept at waking up. We have so mastered the transition we make a hundred times a day, as, like so many will-less dolphins, we plunge and surface, lapse and emerge. We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping live..
|
|
writing
|
Annie Dillard |
|
f072b33
|
I saw in a blue haze all the world poured flat and pale between the mountains
|
|
|
Annie Dillard |
|
aa55ef0
|
When you open a book," the sentimental library posters said, "anything can happen." This was so. A book of fiction was a bomb. It was a land mine you wanted to go off. You wanted it to blow your whole day. Unfortunately, hundreds of thousands of books were duds. They had been rusting out of everyone's way for so long that they no longer worked. There was no way to distinguish the duds from the live mines except to throw yourself at them hea..
|
|
|
Annie Dillard |
|
456ee16
|
In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them farther over the world's rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our lif..
|
|
unity
science
life
love
sea
|
Annie Dillard |
|
89192d9
|
You can serve or you can sing, and wreck your heart in prayer, working the world's hard work.
|
|
|
Annie Dillard |
|
89a0248
|
Noticing and remembering everything would trap bright scenes to light and fill the blank and darkening past which was already piling up behind me. The growing size of that blank and ever-darkening past frightened me; it loomed beside me like a hole in the air and battened on scraps of my life I failed to claim. If one day I forgot to notice my life, and be damned grateful for it, the blank cave would suck me up entire.
|
|
|
Annie Dillard |
|
75d5d66
|
Get to work. 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.
|
|
writing-life
writing
imagination
|
Annie Dillard |
|
90ce133
|
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."
|
|
metaphor
science
sea-lion
snail
systems-analyst
water
|
Annie Dillard |
|
36d797e
|
Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed? Can the writer isolate and vivify all in experience that most deeply engages our intellects and our heats? Can the writer renew our hope for literary forms? Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and ..
|
|
understanding
writing-life
reading
writing
|
Annie Dillard |
|
e28d596
|
There is neither a proportional relationship, nor an inverse one, between a writer's estimation of a work in progress & its actual quality. The feeling that the work is magnificent, & the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged.
|
|
writing
|
Annie Dillard |
|
85d9bc3
|
Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation's short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit.
|
|
time
death
life
passage
|
Annie Dillard |
|
06b38c8
|
Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment. "The most demanding part of living a lifet..
|
|
|
Annie Dillard |
|
02436c4
|
There are 1,198,500,000 people alive now in China. To get a feel for what that means, simply take yourself - in all your singularity, importance, complexity, and love - and multiply by 1,198,500,000. See? Nothing to it.
|
|
wisdom
|
Annie Dillard |
|
02197ce
|
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?
|
|
philosophy
|
Annie Dillard |
|
54f9252
|
She is nine, beloved, as open-faced as the sky and as self-contained. I have watched her grow. As recently as three or four years ago, she had a young child's perfectly shallow receptiveness; she fitted into the world of time, it fitted into her, as thoughtlessly as sky fits its edges, or a river its banks. But as she has grown, her smile has widened with a touch of fear and her glance has taken on depth. Now she is aware of some of the los..
|
|
time
loss
youth
|
Annie Dillard |
|
1d4b1dd
|
I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again
|
|
|
Annie Dillard |
|
f58c33d
|
I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam. It is possible, in deep space, to sail on solar wind. Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.
|
|
|
Annie Dillard |
|
1134c26
|
The mountains are great stone bells; they clang together like nuns. Who shushed the stars? There are a thousand million galaxies easily seen in the Palomar reflector; collisions between and among them do, of course, occur. But these collisions are very long and silent slides. Billions of stars sift amont each other untouched, too distant even to be moved, heedless as always, hushed. The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse w..
|
|
stars
nature
god
life
mountains
listening
|
Annie Dillard |