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
waking scales awake
I woke at intervals until . . . the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not.
metaphysical irrational
The irrational haunts the metaphysical.
time children ascending
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.
skulls people feelings
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.
oxygen blood iron
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 of iron, you get a molecule of hemoglobin. The iron atom combines with all the other atoms to make red blood, the streaming red dots in the goldfish's tail.
schedules chaos catching
A schedule defends from chaos and whim. A net for catching days.
all-things
Push it. examine all things intensely and relentlessly.
wings may bucks
Even if things are as bad as they could possible be, and as meaningless, then matters of truth are themselves indifferent; we may as well please our sensibilities and, with as much spirit as we can muster, go out with a buck and a wing.
peaches
I couldn't unpeach the peaches.
tunnels faces mystery
Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf
talent draws
God gave me a talent to draw. I 'owed' it to him to develop the talent.
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.
time loneliness age
The surest sign of age is loneliness.