Annie Dillard

 

If you want to read me, read Annie Dillard.

She has this knack for scripting my thoughts into words. She always says exactly what I wanted to say, but better.

For work I'm supposed to write an article on refugees. I haven't written in awhile; I'm a little out of practice. But I've found that Annie Dillard cracks my mind open a little bit, helps me see inside myself. Last summer I read The Maytrees and I was thinking in poetry for weeks.

So when I'm stumped in my writing, I read Annie. Because if you're thinking in poetry, then anything you write is bound to be beautiful, right?

Here, let me share some of her charm with you:

“She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live. She read books as one would breathe ether, to sink in and die.”
― Annie Dillard, The Living

“The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.”
― Annie Dillard 

“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.”
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek  

“You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it.”
― Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk

“You can't test courage cautiously, so I ran hard and waved my arms hard, happy.”
― Annie Dillard, An American Childhood 

"There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage.

I won’t have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus.

Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock--more than a maple--a universe. This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.”
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek