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
door dying guest host last please pray prayer thank thanks
I think the dying pray at the last not please but thank you as a guest thanks his host at the door
days spend
Because how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
heart sleep home
We sleep to time's hurdy-gurdy; we wake, if ever we wake, to the silence of God. And then, when we wake to the deep shores of time uncreated, then when the dazzling dark breaks over the far slopes of time, then it's time to toss things, like our reason, and our will; then it's time to break our necks for home. There are no events but thoughts and the heart's hard turning, the heart's slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times.
birthday self ironic
It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as separating us from our creator, our very self-consciousness, is also the one thing that divides us from our fellow creatures. It was a bitter birthday present from evolution.
time-flies duration doe
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.
gears belief desks
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.
land peaceful way
No one escapes the wilderness on the way to the promised land.
caring human-nature humans
Caring passionately about something isn't against nature, and it isn't against human nature. It's what we're here to do.
rest-in-peace mystery life-is
Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.
time men grace
Experiencing the present purely is being empty and hollow; you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.
jest made earnest
The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest.
seasons
These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.
fancy
We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all.
waiting silence listening
You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you hear it: There is nothing there...You feel the world's word as a tension, a hum, a single chorused note everywhere the same. This is it: This hum is the silence.