UBELIEVABLE DEATH

'Of course, he had always known he was going to die. He never, however, believed it.'

Annie Dillard, The Living: A Novel, p.323.

COULD I BE A WRITER?

'A well-known writer got collared by a university student who asked, "Do you think I could be a writer?"

"Well," the writer said, "I don't know...Do you like sentences?"

The writer could see the student's amazement. Sentences? Do I like sentences? I am twenty years old and do I like sentences? If he had liked sentences, of course, he could begin, like a joyful painter I knew. I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, "I liked the smell of paint."'

Annie Dillard, The Writing Life, p.70.

THE CHALLENGES OF WRITING

'I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend. During visiting hours, I enter its room with dread and sympathy for its many disorders. I hold its hand, and hope it will get better.

This tender relationship can change in a twinkling. If you skip a visit or two, a work in progress can turn on you.

A work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight. It is barely domesticated, a musing on which you one day fastened a halter, but which you now cannot catch. It is a lion you cage in your study. As the work grows, it gets harder to control; it is a lion growing in strength. You can visit it every day and reassert you mastery over it. If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the door to its room. You enter its room with bravura, holding a chair at the thing and shouting, "Simba!"'

Annie Dillard, The Writing Life, p.52.

LOVE

'...love was an act of will...'
Annie Dillard, The Maytrees, p.161. 

HOSPITALITY

'Did anyone actually like adult social life? Ping-Pong brought laughter as respectable entertainment did not. He and Deary wasted their many-paned dining room on dinner parties instead of ongoing games and music.' 

Annie Dillard, The Maytrees, p.102. 

PARENTAL LOVE

'Until you have a baby, her mother had said, you don't know what love is! Her mother volunteered this on the day of Lou's one and only wedding. - Oh, Lou wanted to say, go soak your head. After Lou brought forth Petie, she at once recalled her mother's words, forgave, and endorsed them.' 

Annie Dillard, The Maytrees, p.40. 

GRIEF

'If you were a prehistoric Aleut and your wife or husband died, your people braced your joints for grief. That is, they lashed hide bindings around your knees, ankles, elbows, shoulders and hips. You could still move, barely, as if swaddled. Otherwise, the Aleuts said, in your grief you would go to pieces just as the skeleton would go to pieces. You would fall apart.'  

Annie Dillard, The Maytrees, p.40. 

LOVE

'...her face was his eyes' home...'
Annie Dillard, The Maytrees, p.37. 

LOVE & BABIES

'Falling in love, like having a baby, rubs against the current of our lives: separation, loss, and death. That is the joy of them.' 

Annie Dillard, The Maytrees, p.4. 

LIFE

'And like Billy Bray I go my way, and my left foot says "Glory," and my right foot says "Amen": in and out of Shadow Creek, upstream and down, exultant, in a daze, dancing, to the twin silver trumpets of praise.'

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, p.237.

HUMANKIND

'The frog that the giant water bug sucked had, presumably, a rush of pure feeling for about a second, before its brain turned to broth. I, however, had been sapped by various strong feelings about the incident almost daily for several years.

Do the barnacle larvae care? Does the lacewing who eats her eggs care? If they do not care, then why am I making all this fuss? If I am a freak, then why don't I hush?

Our excessive emotions are so patently painful and harmful to us as a species that I can hardly believe that they evolved. Other creatures manage to have effective matings and even stable societies without great emotions, and they have a bonus in that they need not ever mourn. (But some higher animals have emotions that we think similar to ours: dogs, elephants, otters, and sea mammals mourn their dead. Why do that to an otter? What creator could be so cruel, not to kill otters, but to let them care?) It would seem that emotions are the curse, not death - emotions that appear to have devolved 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.'

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, p.159.

CREATION

'What is man, that thou are mindful of him? This is where the great modern religions are so unthinkably radical: the love of God! For we can see that we are as many as the leaves of trees. But it could be that our faithlessness is a cowering cowardice born of our very smallness, a massive failure of imagination. Certainly nature seems to exult in abounding radicality, extremism, anarchy. If we were to judge nature by its common sense or likelehood, we wouldn't believe that the world existed. In nature improbabilities are the one stiock in trade. The whole creation is one lunatic fringe. If creation had been left up to me, I'm sure I wouldn't have had the imagination or courage to do more than shape a single, reasonably sized atom, smooth as a snowball, and let it go at that. No claims of any and all revelations could be so far-fetched as a single giraffe.

The question from agnosticism is, Who turned on the lights? The question from faith is, Whatever for?'

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, p.131.

CREATION

'Of all known forms of life, only ten percent are still living today. All other forms - fantastic plants, ordinary plants, living animals with unimaginably various wings, tails, teeth, brains - are utterly and forever gone. That is a great many forms that have been created. Multiplying ten times the number of living forms today yields a profusion that is quite beyond what I consider thinkable. Why so many forms? Why not just that one hydrogen atom? The creator goes off on one wild, specific tangent after another, or millions simultaneously, with an exuberance that would seem to be unwarranted, and with an abandoned energy sprung from an unfathomable font. What is going on here? The point of the dragonfly's terrible lip, the giant water bug, birdsong, or the beautiful dazzle and flash of sunlighted minnows, is not that it all fits together like clockwork - for it doesn't particularly, not even inside the goldfish bowl - but that it all flows so freely wild, like the creek, that is all surges in such a free, fringed tangle. Freedom is the world's water and weather, the world's nourishment freely given, its soil and sap: and the creator loves pizzazz.'

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, p.125.

CREATION

'Look, in short, at practically anything - the coot's feet, the mantis's face, a banana, the human ear - and see that not only did the creator create everything, but that he is apt to create anything. He'll stop at nothing.'

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek, p.124.

CREATION

'In other words, even on the perfectly ordinary and clearly visible level, creation carries on with an intricacy unfathomable and apparentely uncalled for. The long ping into being of the first hydrogen atom ex nihilo was so unthinkably, violently radical, that surely it ought to have been enough, more than enough. But look what happens. You open the door and all heaven and hell break loose.'

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, p.121.

CREATION

'You are God. You want to make a forest, something to hold the soil, lock up solar energy, and give off oxygen. Wouldn't it be simpler just to rough in a slab of chemicals, a green acre of goo?'

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, p.119.

TREES

'Every year a given tree creates absolutely from scratch ninety-nine percent of its living parts. Water lifting up tree trunks can climb one hundred and fifty feet an hour; in full summer a tree can, and does, heave a ton of water every day. A big elm in a single season might make as many as six million leaves, wholly intricate, without budging an inch; I couldn't make one.'

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, p.105.

BEAUTY

'It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singing. If the mockingbird were chirping to give us the long-sought formulae for a unified field theory, the point would be only slightly less irrelevant. The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful? I hesitate to use the word so badly, but the question is there. The question is there since I take it as given, as I have said, that beauty is something objectively performed - the tree falls in the forest - having been externally, stumbled across or missed, as real and as present as both sides of the moon. This modified lizard's song welling out of the fireplace has a wild, utterly foreign music; it becomes more and more beautiful as it becomes more and more familiar. If the lyric is simply "mine, mine, mine," then why the extravagance of the score? It has the liquid, intricate sound of every creek's tumble over every configuration of rock creek-bottom in the country. Who, telegraphing a message would trouble to transmit a five-act play, or Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," and who, receiving the message, could understand it? Beauty itself is the language to which we have no key; it is the mute cipher, the crytogram, the uncracked, unbroken code. And it could be that for beauty, as it turned out to be for French, that there is no key, that "oui" will never make sense in our language but only in its own, and that we need to start all over again, on a new continent, learning the strange syllables one by one.'

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, p.101.

CHILDREN

'When we lose our innocence - when we start feeling the weight of the atmosphere and learn that there's death in the pot - we take leave of our senses. Only children can hear the song of the male house mouse. Only children keep their eyes open. The only thing they have got is sense; they have highly developed "input systems," admitting all data indiscriminately. Matt Spireng has collected thousands of arrowheads and spearheads; he says that you really want to find arrowheads, you must walk with a child - a child will pick up everything. All my adult life I have wished to see the cemented case of the caddisfly larva. It took Sally Moore, the youngest daughter of friends, to find one on the pebbled bottom of a shallow stream on whose bank we sat side by side. "What's this?" she asked. That, I wanted to say as I recognized the prize she held, is a momento mori for people who read too much.'

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, p.88.

PRIDE

'An infant who has just learnt to hold his head up has a frank and forthright way of gazing about him in bewilderment. He hasn't the faintest clue where he is, and he aims to learn. In a couple of years, what he will have learned instead is how to fake it: he'll have the cocksure air of a squatter who has come to feel he owns the place. Some unwonted, taught pride diverts us from our original intent which is to explore the neighbourhood, view the landscape, to discover at least where it is that we have been so startlingly set down, if we can't learn why.'

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, p.23.