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
silly writing long-ago
It's a little silly to finally learn how to write at this age. But I long ago realized I was secretly sincere.
summer spring teaching
Every spring he vowed to quit teaching school, and every summer he missed his pupils and searched for them on the streets.
air layers awareness
I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers.
believe common-sense imagination
It could be that our faithlessness is a cowering cowardice born of our very smallness, a massive failure of imagination... If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldnt believe the world existed.
home sigh-of-relief height
But enough is enough. One turns at last even from glory itself with a sigh of relief. From the depths of mystery, and even from the heights of splendor, we bounce back and hurry for the latitudes of home.
dying triviality persons
What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
cities self consciousness
Self-consciousness is the curse of the city and all that sophistication implies.
mean cutting animal
Peeping through my keyhold I see within the range of only about 30 percent of the light that comes from the sun; the rest is infrared and some little ultraviolet, perfectly apparent to many animals, but invisible to me. A nightmare network of ganglia, charged and firing without my knowledge, cuts and splices what I see, editing it for my brain. Donald E. Carr points out that the sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brian: 'This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is.
reading light sight
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.
beauty men race
Unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous.
stupid body dear
The dear, stupid body is as easily satisfied as a spaniel.
life children culture
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 the planet
life ends wander
Our life seems cursed to be a wiggle merely, and a wandering without end.
life sleep water
We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall.