Annie Dillard
I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again.
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.
At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it.
Aim for the chopping block. If you aim for the wood, you will have nothing. Aim past the wood, aim through the wood; aim for the chopping block.
No one escapes the wilderness on the way to the promised land.Collection: Land
We are here to witness the creation and to abet it. We are here to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed. Together we notice not only each mountain shadow and each stone on the beach but, especially, we notice the beautiful faces and complex natures of each other. 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. We witness our generation and our times. We watch the weather. Otherwise, creation would be playing to an empty house.Collection: Beautiful
At a certain point, you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening.Collection: Sea
It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping God may wake someday and take offense, or the waking God may draw us out to where we can never return.Collection: Sleep
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.Collection: Book
I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam.Collection: Light
Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?Collection: Reading
The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less.Collection: Greed
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. . . . Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.Collection: Book
Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.Collection: Life
Writing a book is like rearing children -- willpower has very little to do with it. If you have a little baby crying in the middle of the night, and if you depend only on willpower to get you out of bed to feed the baby, that baby will starve. You do it out of love.Collection: Baby
The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.Collection: Thinking
An Inuit hunter asked the local missionary priest: If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell? No, said the priest, not if you did not know. Then why, asked the Inuit earnestly, did you tell me?Collection: Life
The more you read, the more you will write. The better the stuff you read, the better the stuff you will write.Collection: Writing
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living.Collection: Motivational
We are here on the planet only once, and might as well get a feel for the place.Collection: Journey
Make connections; let rip; and dance where you can.Collection: Rip
I wake expectant, hoping to see a new thing.Collection: Recovery
If we listened to our intellect, we’d never have a love affair... or go into business. You’ve got to jump off cliffs and build your wings on the way down.Collection: Wings
I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wondering awed about on a splintered wreck I've come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty bats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them.Collection: Beautiful
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.Collection: Inspirational
why did I have to keep learning this same thing over and over?Collection: Keep Learning
He judged the instant and let go; he flung himself loose into the stars.Collection: Letting Go
Write as if you are dying.Collection: Writing
Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me. This is easy to write, easy to read, and hard to believe.Collection: Believe
The dear, stupid body is as easily satisfied as a spaniel.Collection: Stupid
We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall.Collection: Life
The way to learn about a writer is to read the text. Or texts.Collection: Way
Our life seems cursed to be a wiggle merely, and a wandering without end.Collection: Life
The mind wants the world to return its love, or its awareness; the mind wants to know all the world, and all eternity, and God.Collection: Mind
Admire the world for never ending on you -- as you would an opponent, without taking your eyes away from him, or walking away.Collection: Eye
When I walk with a camera, I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment's light prints on my own silver gut. When I see this second way I am above all an unscrupulous observer.Collection: Reading
The mind itself is an art object. It is a Mondrian canvas onto whose homemade grids it fits its own preselected products. Our knowledge is contextual and only contextual. Ordering and invention coincide: we call their collaboration knowledge.Collection: Art
I work mornings only. I go out to lunch. Afternoons I play with the baby, walk with my husband, or shovel mail.Collection: Baby
Books swept me away, this way and that, one after the other; I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Pain
The world did not have me in mind; it had no mind. It was a coincidental collection of things and people, of items, an I myself was one such item...the things in the world did not necessarily cause my overwhelming feelings; the feelings were inside me, beneath my skin, behind my ribs, withing my skull. They were even, to some extent, under my control.Collection: Skulls
Time is the continuous loop, the snakeskin with scales endlessly overlapping without beginning or end, or time is an ascending spiral if you will, like a child's toy Slinky.Collection: Time
No one can help you if you're stuck in a work. Only you can figure a way out, because only you can see the work's possibilities.Collection: Way
Caring passionately about something isn't against nature, and it isn't against human nature. It's what we're here to do.Collection: Caring
The way we live our days, is the way we live our lives.Collection: Life
After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.Collection: Eye
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.Collection: Summer
There is always the temptation in life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for years on end. It is all so self conscience, so apparently moral...But I won't have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous...more extravagant and bright. We are...raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus.Collection: Journey