Annie Dillard
Annie Dillard
Annie Dillardis an American author, best known for her narrative prose in both fiction and non-fiction. She has published works of poetry, essays, prose, and literary criticism, as well as two novels and one memoir. Her 1974 work Pilgrim at Tinker Creek won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Dillard taught for 21 years in the English department of Wesleyan University, in Middletown, Connecticut...
ProfessionNon-Fiction Author
Date of Birth30 April 1945
CityPittsburgh, PA
mind doe would-be
The mind of the writer does indeed do something before it dies, and so does its owner, but I would be hard put to call it living.
years waking would-be
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.
subjects
A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.
more-time housewife housework
I'm a housewife: I spend far more time on housework than anything else.
jealous winning thinking
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.
mistake buddhism thinking
Buddhism notes that it is always a mistake to think your soul can go it alone.
love beauty religion
As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.
time loneliness age
The surest sign of age is loneliness.
summer mother running
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 us: that we stay, that we stay and find a place among its familiar possibilities. Mother knew we would go; she encouraged us.
grateful past light
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.
keep-learning
why did I have to keep learning this same thing over and over?
perfection vision pressure
Theirs is the mystery of continuous creation and all that providence implies: the uncertainty of vision, the horror of the fixed, the dissolution of the present, the intricacy of beauty, the pressure of fecundity, the elusiveness of the free, and the flawed nature of perfection.
library special world
It would seem that emotions are the curse, not death-emotions that appear to have developed upon a few freaks as a special curse from Malevolence. All right then. It is our emotions that are amiss. We are freaks, the world is fine, and let us all go have lobotomies to restore us to a natural state. We can leave the library then, go back to the creek lobotomized, and live on its banks as untroubled as any muskrat or reed. You first.
powerful firsts glances
It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.