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I Am A Frayed And Nibbled Survivor In A Fallen World, And I Am Getting Along. I Am Aging And Eaten And Have Done My Share Of Eating Too. I Am Not Washed And Beautiful, In Control Of A Shining World In Which Everything Fits, But Instead Am Wondering Awed About On A Splintered Wreck I've Come To Care For, Whose Gnawed Trees Breathe A Delicate Air, Whose Bloodied And Scarred Creatures Are My Dearest Companions, And Whose Beauty Bats And Shines Not In Its Imperfections But Overwhelmingly In Spite Of Them.

-Annie Dillard

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I Am A Frayed

Annie Dillard

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I Am A Frayed And Nibbled Survivor In A Fallen World, And I Am Getting Along. I Am Aging And Eaten And Have Done My Share Of Eating Too. I Am Not Washed And Beautiful, In Control Of A Shining World In Which Everything Fits, But Instead Am Wondering Awed About On A Splintered Wreck I've Come To Care For, Whose Gnawed Trees Breathe A Delicate Air, Whose Bloodied And Scarred Creatures Are My Dearest Companions, And Whose Beauty Bats And Shines Not In Its Imperfections But Overwhelmingly In Spite Of Them.

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When You Write, You Lay Out A Line Of Words. The Line Of Words Is A Miner's Pick, A Wood Carver's Gouge, A Surgeon's Probe. You Wield It, And It Digs A Path You Follow. Soon You Find Yourself Deep In New Territory. Is It A Dead End, Or Have You Located The Real Subject? You Will Know Tomorrow, Or This Time Next Year.

Nature's Silence Is Its One Remark, And Every Flake Of World Is A Chip Off That Old Mute And Immutable Block.

It Is Difficult To Undo Our Own Damage, And To Recall To Our Presence That Which We Have Asked To Leave.

The Mind Itself Is An Art Object. It Is A Mondrian Canvas Onto Whose Homemade Grids It Fits Its Own Preselected Products. Our Knowledge Is Contextual And Only Contextual. Ordering And Invention Coincide: We Call Their Collaboration Knowledge.

It Would Seem That Emotions Are The Curse, Not Death-emotions That Appear To Have Developed 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.

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. We Must Somehow Take A Wider View, Look At The Whole Landscape, Really See It, And Describe What's Going On Here. Then We Can At Least Wail The Right Question Into The Swaddling Band Of Darkness, Or, If It Comes To That, Choir The Proper Praise.

Write As If You Are Dying.

Make Connections; Let Rip; And Dance Where You Can.

What A Hideout: Holiness Lies Spread And Borne Over The Surface Of Time And Stuff Like Color.

When I First Read The Words 'introvert' And 'extrovert' When I Was 10, I Thought I Was Both.

Don't Save Something Good For A Later Place. Don't Hold Back From Your Students, From The Poor, Don't Try To Keep Anything For Yourself 'cause It'll Turn To Ashes.

Nature Is, Above All, Profligate. Don't Believe Them When They Tell You How Economical And Thrifty Nature Is, Whose Leaves Return To The Soil. Wouldn't It Be Cheaper To Leave Them On The Tree In The First Place? This Deciduous Business Alone Is A Radical Scheme, The Brainchild Of A Deranged Manic-depressive With Limitless Capital. Extravagance! Nature Will Try Anything Once.

I Break Up Through The Skin Of Awareness A Thousand Times A Day, As Dolphins Burst Through Seas, And Dive Again, And Rise, And Dive.

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.

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.

Write About Winter In The Summer. Describe Norway As Ibsen Did, From A Desk In Italy; Describe Dublin As James Joyce Did, From A Desk In Paris. Willa Cather Wrote Her Prairie Novels In New York City; Mark Twain Wrote Huckleberry Finn In Hartford, Connecticut. Recently, Scholars Learned That Walt Whitman Rarely Left His Room.

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.

At Its Best, The Sensation Of Writing Is That Of Any Unmerited Grace. It Is Handed To You, But Only If You Look For It.

There Were No Formerly Heroic Times, And There Was No Formerly Pure Generation. There Is No One Here But Us Chickens, And So It Has Always Been.

Appealing Workplaces Are To Be Avoided. One Wants A Room With No View, So Imagination Can Meet Memory In The Dark.

What Is Important Is The Moment Of Opening A Life And Feeling It Touch--with An Electric Hiss And Cry--this Speckled Mineral Sphere, Our Present World.

It Was Less Like Seeing Than Like Being For The First Time Seen, Knocked Breathless By A Powerful Glance.

If We Were To Judge Nature By Common Sense Or Likelihood, We Wouldn't Believe The World Existed.

Your Freedom As A Writer Is Not Freedom Of Expression In The Sense Of Wild Blurting; You May Not Let Rip. It Is Life At Its Most Free, If You Are Fortunate Enough To Be Able To Try It, Because You Select Your Materials, Invent Your Task, And Pace Yourself.

The Answer Must Be, I Think, That Beauty And Grace Are Performed Whether Or Not We Will Or Sense Them. The Least We Can Do Is Try To Be There.

The More You Read, The More You Will Write. The Better The Stuff You Read, The Better The Stuff You Will Write.

A Schedule Defends From Chaos And Whim. It Is A Net For Catching Days. It Is A Scaffolding On Which A Worker Can Stand And Labor With Both Hands At Sections Of Time.

It Is The Fixed That Horrifies Us, The Fixed That Assails Us With The Tremendous Force Of Mindlessness. The Fixed Is A Mason Jar,and We Can't Beat It Open. ...the Fixed Is A World Without Fire--dead Flint, Dead Tinder, And Nowhere A Spark. It Is Motion Without Direction, Force Without Power, The Aimless Procession Of Caterpillars Round The Rim Of A Vase, And I Hate It Because At Any Moment I Myself Might Step To That Charmed And Glistening Thread.

Tonight I Walked Around The Pond Scaring Frogs; A Couple Of Them Jumped Off, Going, In Effect, Eek, And Most Grunted, And The Pond Was Still. But One Big Frog, Bright Green Like A Poster-paint Frog, Didn't Jump, So I Waved My Arm And Stamped To Scare It, And It Jumped Suddenly, And I Jumped, And Then Everything In The Pond Jumped, And I Laughed And Laughed.

God Gave Me A Talent To Draw. I 'owed' It To Him To Develop The Talent.

There Is Neither A Proportional Relationship, Nor An Inverse One, Between A Writer’s Estimation Of A Work In Progress & Its Actual Quality. The Feeling That The Work Is Magnificent, & The Feeling That It Is Abominable, Are Both Mosquitoes To Be Repelled, Ignored, Or Killed, But Not Indulged.

Experiencing The Present Purely Is Being Empty And Hollow; You Catch Grace As A Man Fills His Cup Under A Waterfall.

Crystals Grew Inside Rock Like Arithmetic Flowers. They Lengthened And Spread, Added Plane To Plane In An Awed And Perfect Obedience To An Absolute Geometry That Even Stones - Maybe Only The Stones - Understood.

How Can People Think That Artists Seek A Name? A Name, Like A Face, Is Something You Have When You're Not Alone. There Is No Such Thing As An Artist: There Is Only The World, Lit Or Unlit As The Light Allows.

Out Of A Human Population On Earth Of Four And A Half Billion, Perhaps Twenty People Can Write A Book In A Year. Some People Lift Cars, Too. Some People Enter Week-long Sled-dog Races, Go Over Niagara Falls In A Barrel, Fly Planes Through The Arc De Triomphe. Some People Feel No Pain In Childbirth. Some People Eat Cars. There Is No Call To Take Human Extremes As Norms.

The Extravagant Gesture Is The Very Stuff Of Creation.

The World Is Fairly Studded And Strewn With Pennies Cast Broadside By A Generous Hand. But- And This Is The Point- Who Gets Excited By A Mere Penny? But If You Cultivate A Healthy Poverty And Simplicity, So That Finding A Penny Will Literally Make Your Day, Then, Since The World Is In Fact Planted In Pennies, You Have With Your Poverty Bought A Lifetime Of Days.

One Of The Few Things I Know About Writing Is This: Spend It All, Shoot It, Play It, Lose It, All, Right Away, Every Time. Do Not Hoard What Seems Good For A Later Place In The Book, Or For Another Book, Give It, Give It All, Give It Now.

Write About Winter In The Summer.

How We Spend Our Days Is, Of Course, How We Spend Our Lives. What We Do With This Hour, And That One, Is What We Are Doing. A Schedule Defends From Chaos And Whim. It Is A Net For Catching Days. It Is A Scaffolding On Which A Worker Can Stand And Labor With Both Hands At Sections Of Time. A Schedule Is A Mock-up Of Reason And Order—willed, Faked, And So Brought Into Being; It Is A Peace And A Haven Set Into The Wreck Of Time; It Is A Lifeboat On Which You Find Yourself, Decades Later, Still Living.

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.

I Couldn't Unpeach The Peaches.

Are You Living Just A Little And Calling That Life?

You Can, In Short, Lead The Life Of The Mind, Which Is, Despite Some Appalling Frustrations, The Happiest Life On Earth. And One Day, In The Thick Of This, Approaching Some Partial Vision, You Will (i Swear) Find Yourself On The Receiving End Of - Of All Things - An "idea For A Story," And You Will, God Save You, Start Thinking About Writing Some Fiction Of Your Own. Then You Will Understand, In What I Fancy Might Be A Blinding Flash, That All This Passionate Thinking Is What Fiction Is About, That All Those Other Fiction Writers Started As You Did, And Are Laborers In The Same Vineyard.

Why Did I Have To Keep Learning This Same Thing Over And Over?

We Wake, If Ever At All, To Mystery.

I Like To Be Aware Of A Book As A Piece Of Writing, And Aware Of Its Structure As A Product Of Mind, And Yet I Want To Be Able To See The Represented World Through It. I Admire Artists Who Succeed In Dividing My Attention More Or Less Evenly Between The World Of Their Books And The Art Of Their Books . . . So That A Reader May Study The Work With Pleasure As Well As The World That It Describes.

You Do What You Do Out Of Your Private Love Of The Thing Itself.

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.

Writing A Book Is Like Rearing Children -- Willpower Has Very Little To Do With It. If You Have A Little Baby Crying In The Middle Of The Night, And If You Depend Only On Willpower To Get You Out Of Bed To Feed The Baby, That Baby Will Starve. You Do It Out Of Love.

Geography Is The Key, The Crucial Accident Of Birth. A Piece Of Protein Could Be A Snail, A Sea Lion, Or A Systems Analyst, But It Had To Start Somewhere. This Is Not Science; It Is Merely Metaphor. And The Landscape In Which The Protein "starts" Shapes Its End As Surely As Bowls Shape Water.

It Has Always Been A Happy Thought To Me That The Creek Runs On All Night, New Every Minute, Whether I Wish It Or Know It Or Care, As A Closed Book On A Shelf Continues To Whisper To Itself Its Own Inexhaustible Tale. So Many Things Have Been Shown So To Me On These Banks, So Much Light Has Illumined Me By Reflection Here Where The Water Comes Down, That I Can Hardly Believe That This Grace Never Flags, That The Pouring From Ever-renewable Sources Is Endless, Impartial, And Free.

The Courage Of Children And Beasts Is A Function Of Innocence.

Trees Have A Curious Relationship To The Subject Of The Present Moment. There Are Many Created Things In The Universe That Outlive Us, That Outlive The Sun, Even, But I Can't Think About Them. I Live With Trees.

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.

Could Two Live That Way? Could Two Live Under The Wild Rose, And Explore By The Pond, So That The Smooth Mind Of Each Is As Everywhere Present To The Other, And As Received And As Unchallenged, As Falling Snow?

We Live In All We Seek. The Hidden Shows Up In Too-plain Sight. It Lives Captive On The Face Of The Obvious - The People, Events, And Things Of The Day - To Which We As Sophisticated Children Have Long Since Become Oblivious. What A Hideout: Holiness Lies Spread And Borne Over The Surface Of Time And Stuff Like Color.

I Used To Have A Cat, An Old Fighting Tom, Who Would Jump Through The Open Window By My Bed In The Middle Of The Night And Land On My Chest. I'd Half-awaken. He'd Stick His Skull Under My Nose And Purr, Stinking Of Urine And Blood. Some Nights He Kneaded My Bare Chest With His Front Paws, Powerfully, Arching His Back, As If Sharpening His Claws, Or Pummeling A Mother For Milk. And Some Mornings I'd Wake In Daylight To Find My Body Covered With Paw Prints In Blood; I Looked As Though I'd Been Painted With Roses.

The Gaps Are The Thing. The Gaps Are The Spirit's One Home, The Altitudes And Latitudes So Dazzlingly Spare And Clean That The Spirit Can Discover Itself Like A Once-blind Man Unbound. The Gaps Are The Clefts In The Rock Where You Cower To See The Back Parts Of God; They Are Fissures Between Mountains And Cells The Wind Lances Through, The Icy Narrowing Fiords Splitting The Cliffs Of Mystery. 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-universe.

The Reader's Ear Must Adjust Down From Loud Life To The Subtle, Imaginary Sounds Of The Written Word. An Ordinary Reader Picking Up A Book Can't Yet Hear A Thing; It Will Take Half An Hour To Pick Up The Writing's Modulations, Its Ups And Downs And Louds And Softs.

No One Can Help You If You're Stuck In A Work. Only You Can Figure A Way Out, Because Only You Can See The Work's Possibilities.

We Still And Always Want Waking.

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'tbut That It All Flows So Freely Wild, Like The Creek, That It All Surges In Such A Free, Finged Tangle. Freedom Is The World's Water And Weather, The World's Nourishment Freely Given, Its Soil And Sap: And The Creator Loves Pizzazz.

If You're Going To Publish A Book, You Probably Are Going To Make A Fool Of Yourself.

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

Johnston's Books Are Beautifully Written And Among The Funniest I Have Ever Read.

Young Children Have No Sense Of Wonder. They Bewilder Well, But Few Things Surprise Them. All Of It Is New To Young Children, After All, And Equally Gratuitous.

I Have Since Only Rarely Seen The Tree With The Lights In It. The Vision Comes And Goes, Mostly Goes, But I Live For It, For The Moment When The Mountains Open And A New Light Roars In Spate Through The Crack, And The Mountains Slam.

I Cannot Imagine A Sorrier Pursuit Than Struggling For Years To Write A Book That Attempts To Appeal To People Who Do Not Read In The First Place.

We Live Half Our Waking Lives And All Of Our Sleeping Lives In Some Private, Useless, And Insensible Waters We Never Mention Or Recall.

Today Is One Of Those Excellent January Partly Cloudies In Which Light Chooses An Unexpected Part Of The Landscape To Trick Out In Gilt, And Then The Shadow Sweeps It Away. You Know You're Alive. You Take Huge Steps, Trying To Feel The Planet's Roundness Arc Between Your Feet.

It Is Difficult To Undo Our Own Damage, And To Recall To Our Presence That Which We Have Asked To Leave. It Is Hard To Desecrate A Grove And Change Your Mind. The Very Holy Mountains Are Keeping Mum. We Doused The Burning Bush And Cannot Rekindle It; We Are Lighting Matches In Vain Under Every Green Tree.

Write As If You Were Dying. At The Same Time, Assume You Write For An Audience Consisting Solely Of Terminal Patients. That Is, After All, The Case. What Would You Begin Writing If You Knew You Would Die Soon? What Could You Say To A Dying Person That Would Not Enrage By Its Triviality?

I Still Try To Keep My Eyes Open. I'm Always On The Lookout For Antlion Traps In Sandy Soil, Monarch Pupae Near Milkweed, Skipper Larvae In Locust Leaves. These Things Are Utterly Common, And I've Not Seen One

Why Do We People In Churches Seem Like Cheerful, Brainless Tourists On A Packaged Tour Of The Absolute?

We Are Most Deeply Asleep At The Switch When We Fancy We Control Any Switches At All.

Similarly, The Impulse To Keep To Yourself What You Have Learned Is Not Only Shameful, It Is Destructive. Anything You Do Not Give Freely And Abundantly Becomes Lost To You. You Open Your Safe And Find Ashes.

Anything You Do Not Give Freely And Abundantly Becomes Lost To You.

Old Memories Are Very Easy To Get Except That Once You Write About Something You've Destroyed It.

I Am A Fugitive And A Vagabond, A Sojourner Seeking Signs.

The Secret Is Not To Write About What You Love Best, But About What You, Alone, Love At All.

Knowing You Are Alive Is Watching On Every Side Your Generation's Short Time Falling Away As Fast As Rivers Drop Through Air, And Feeling It Hit.

Why Are We Reading, If Not In Hope Of Beauty Laid Bare, Life Heightened And Its Deepest Mystery Probed?

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.

For All The Insularity Of The Old Guard, Pittsburgh Was Always An Open And Democratic Town.

Every Spring He Vowed To Quit Teaching School, And Every Summer He Missed His Pupils And Searched For Them On The Streets.

Our Life Seems Cursed To Be A Wiggle Merely, And A Wandering Without End.

How You Spend Your Days Is How You Spend Your Life.

One Of The Few Things I Know About Writing Is This: Spend It All, Shoot It, Play It, Lose It, All, Right Away, Every Time. Do Not Hoard What Seems Good For A Later Place In The Book, Or For Another Book; Give It, Give It All, Give It Now. . . . Something More Will Arise For Later, Something Better. These Things Fill From Behind, From Beneath, Like Well Water. Similarly, The Impulse To Keep To Yourself What You Have Learned Is Not Only Shameful, It Is Destructive. Anything You Do Not Give Freely And Abundantly Becomes Lost To You. You Open Your Safe And Find Ashes.

Admire The World For Never Ending On You -- As You Would An Opponent, Without Taking Your Eyes Away From Him, Or Walking Away.

The Soul May Ask God For Anything, And Never Fail.

The Pulitzer Is More Useful Than Meaningful.

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.

The Irrational Haunts The Metaphysical.

You Are Wrong If You Think That You Can In Any Way Take The Vision And Tame It... The Vision Is Not So Much Destroyed, Exactly, As It Is, By The Time You Have Finished, Forgotten. It Has Been Replaced By This Changeling.

There Is A Certain Age At Which A Child Looks At You In All Earnestness And Delivers A Long, Pleased Speech In All The True Inflections Of Spoken English, But With Not One Recognizable Syllable. There Is No Way You Can Tell The Child That If Language Had Been A Melody, He Had Mastered It And Done Well, But That Since It Was In Fact A Sense, He Had Botched It Utterly.

What I Call Innocence Is The Spirit's Unself-conscious State At Any Moment Of Pure Devotion To Any Object. It Is At Once A Receptiveness And Total Concentration.

Silence Is Not Our Heritage But Our Destiny; We Live Where We Want To Live.

By Dipping Us Children In The Bible So Often, They Hoped, I Think, To Give Our Lives A Serious Tint, And To Provide Us With Quaintly Magnificent Snatches Of Prayer To Produce As Charms While, Say, Being Mugged For Our Cash Or Jewels.

I Sip My Coffee. I Look At The Mountain, Which Is Still Doing Its Tricks, As You Look At A Still-beautiful Face Belonging To A Person Who Was Once Your Lover In Another Country Years Ago: With Fond Nostalgia, And Recognition, But No Real Feelings Save A Secret Astonishment That You Are Now Strangers. Thanks. For The Memories. 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, Cutting Us Off At Both Ends.

Every Day Is A God, Each Day Is A God, And Holiness Holds Forth In Time.

Just Think: In All The Clean, Beautiful Reaches Of The Solar System, Our Planet Alone Is A Blot; Our Planet Alone Has Death.

Why Do You Never Find Anything Written About That Idiosyncratic Thought You Advert To, About Your Fascination With Something No One Else Understands? Because It Is Up To You. There Is Something You Find Interesting, For A Reason Hard To Explain. It Is Hard To Explain Because You Have Never Read It On Any Page; There You Begin. You Were Made And Set Here To Give Voice To This, Your Own Astonishment.

I'm A Housewife: I Spend Far More Time On Housework Than Anything Else.

Like Any Child, I Slid Into Myself Perfectly Fitted, As A Diver Meets Her Reflection In A Pool. Her Fingertips Enter The Fingertips On The Water, Her Wrists Slide Up Her Arms. The Diver Wraps Herself In Her Reflection Wholly, Sealing It At The Toes, And Wears It As She Climbs Rising From The Pool, And Ever After.

The World Knew You Before You Knew The World.

I Woke At Intervals Until . . . The Intervals Of Waking Tipped The Scales, And I Was More Often Awake Than Not.

I Can't Dance Anymore. Total Knee Replacements. I Can't Do Anything Anymore.

In Literary History, Generation Follows Generation In A Rage.

It's About Waking Up. A Child Wakes Up Over And Over Again, And Notices That She's Living. She Dreams Along, Loving The Exuberant Life Of The Senses, In Love With Beauty And Power, Oblivious To Herself -- And Then Suddenly, Bingo, She Wakes Up And Feels Herself Alive. She Notices Her Own Awareness. And She Notices That She Is Set Down Here, Mysteriously, In A Going World.

All My Books Started Out As Extravagant And Ended Up Pure And Plain.

Buddhism Notes That It Is Always A Mistake To Think Your Soul Can Go It Alone.

What Do I Make Of All This Texture? What Does It Mean About The Kind Of World In Which I Have Been Set Down? The Texture Of The World, Its Filigree And Scrollwork, Means That There Is The Possibility For Beauty Here, A Beauty Inexhaustible In Its Complexity, Which Opens To My Knock, Which Answers In Me A Call I Do Not Remember Calling, And Which Trains Me To The Wild And Extravagant Nature Of The Spirit I Seek.

The World Is Wider 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 And Lazarus.

Push It. Examine All Things Intensely And Relentlessly.

Cruelty Is A Mystery, And The Waste Of Pain. But If We Describe A Word To Compass These Things, A World That Is A Long, Brute Game, Then We Bump Against Another Mystery: The Inrush Of Power And Delight, The Canary That Sings On The Skull.

Possibly Everyone Now Dead Considered His Own Death As A Freak Accident, A Mistake. Some Bad Luck Caused It. Every Enterprising Man Jack Of Them, And Every Sunlit Vigorous Woman And Child, Too, Who Had Seemed So Alive And Pleased, Was Cold As A Meat Hook, And New Chattering People Trampled Their Bones Unregarding, And Rubbed Their Hands Together And Got To Work Improving Their Prospects Till Their Own Feet Slipped And They Went Under Themselves ... Every Place Was A Tilting Edge.

Nature Seems To Exult In Abounding Radicality, Extremism, Anarchy. If We Were To Judge Nature By Its Common Sense Or Likelihood, We Wouldn't Believe The World Existed. In Nature, Improbabilities Are The One Stock In Trade. The Whole Creation Is One Lunatic Fringe. ... No Claims Of Any And All Revelations Could Be So Far-fetched As A Single Giraffe.

To Crank Myself Up I Stood On A Jack And Ran Myself Up. I Tightened Myself Like A Bolt. I Inserted Myself In A Vise-clamp And Wound The Handle Till The Pressure Built. I Drank Coffee In Titrated Doses. It Was A Tricky Business, Requiring The Finely Tuned Judgment Of A Skilled Anesthesiologist. There Was A Tiny Range Within Which Coffee Was Effective, Short Of Which It Was Useless, And Beyond Which, Fatal.

The Universe Was Not Made In Jest But In Solemn Incomprehensible Earnest.

Evolution Loves Death More Than It Loves You Or Me. This Is Easy To Write, Easy To Read, And Hard To Believe.

Cruelty Is A Mystery, And A Waste Of Pain.

Private Life, Book Life, Took Place Where Words Met Imagination Without Passing Through The World.

I Wake Expectant, Hoping To See A New Thing.

Many Writers Do Little Else But Sit In Small Rooms Recalling The Real World.

The Creatures I Seek Do Not Want To Be Seen.

Unfortunately, Nature Is Very Much A Now-you-see-it, Now-you-don't Affair. A Fish Flashes, Then Dissolves In The Water Before My Eyes Like So Much Salt. Deer Apparently Ascend Bodily Into Heaven; The Brightest Oriole Fades Into Leaves.

You Can Serve Or You Can Sing, And Wreck Your Heart In Prayer, Working The World's Hard Work.

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.

Spend The Afternoon. You Can't Take It With You.

An Inuit Hunter Asked The Local Missionary Priest: If I Did Not Know About God And Sin, Would I Go To Hell? No, Said The Priest, Not If You Did Not Know. Then Why, Asked The Inuit Earnestly, Did You Tell Me?

The Dear, Stupid Body Is As Easily Satisfied As A Spaniel.

You Have To Take Pains In A Memoir Not To Hang On The Reader's Arm, Like A Drunk, And Say, 'and Then I Did This And It Was So Interesting.

What Is A House But A Bigger Skin, And A Neighborhood Map But The World's Skin Ever Expanding?

The Interior Life Is Often Stupid.

I Breathed The Air Of History All Unaware, And Walked Oblivious Through Its Littered Layers.

There Is No Shortage Of Good Days. It Is Good Lives That Are Hard To Come By.

I Cannot Cause Light; The Most I Can Do Is Try To Put Myself In The Path Of Its Beam. It Is Possible, In Deep Space, To Sail On Solar Wind. Light, Be It Particle Or Wave, Has Force: You Can Rig A Giant Sail And Go. The Secret Of Seeing Is To Sail On Solar Wind. Hone And Spread Your Spirit Till You Yourself Are A Sail, Whetted, Translucent, Broadside To The Merest Puff

[insects] Are Not Only Cold-blooded, And Green- And Yellow-blooded, But Are Also Cased In A Clacking Horn. They Have Rigid Eyes And Brains Strung Down Their Backs. But They Make Up The Bulk Of Our Comrades-at-life, So I Look To Them For A Glimmer Of Companionship.

Almost All Of My Many Passionate Interests, And My Many Changes Of Mind, Came Through Books. Books Prompted The Many Vows I Made To Myself.

I Am Sorry I Ran From You. I Am Still Running, Running From That Knowledge, That Eye, That Love From Which There Is No Refuge. For You Meant Only Love, And Love, And I Felt Only Fear, And Pain. So Once In Israel Love Came To Us Incarnate, Stood In The Doorway Between Two Worlds, And We Were All Afraid.

It Is Madness To Wear Ladies' Straw Hats And Velvet Hats To Church; We Should All Be Wearing Crash Helmets. Ushers Should Issue Life Preservers And Signal Flares; They Should Lash Us To Our Pews. For The Sleeping God May Wake Someday And Take Offense, Or The Waking God May Draw Us Out To Where We Can Never Return.

The Universe Is Illusion Merely, Not One Speck Of It Real, And We Are Not Only Its Victims, Falling Always Into Or Smashed By A Planet Slung By The Sun-but Also Its Captives, Bound By The Mineral-made Ropes Of Our Senses.

Does Anything Eat Flowers. I Couldn't Recall Having Seen Anything Eat A Flower - Are They Nature's Privileged Pets?

The Sea Pronounces Something, Over And Over, In A Hoarse Whisper; I Cannot Quite Make It Out.

Every Live Thing Is A Survivor On A Kind Of Extended Emergency Bivouac.

The Sensation Of Writing A Book Is The Sensation Of Spinning, Blinded By Love And Daring.

The Way To Learn About A Writer Is To Read The Text. Or Texts.

You Can't Test Courage Cautiously, So I Ran Hard And Waved My Arms Hard, Happy.

Adverbs Are A Sign That You've Used The Wrong Verb.

Novels Written With Film Contracts In Mind Have A Faint But Unmistakable, And Ruinous, Odor.

I Write In My Own Journal When Something Extraordinary Or Funny Happens. And There's Some Nice Imagery In There. I Don't Think Of What To Do With It.

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.

I Know Only Enough Of God To Want To Worship Him, By Any Means Ready To Hand.

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.

I Wake Up Thinking: What Am I Reading? What Will I Read Next? I'm Terrified That I'll Run Out, That I Will Read Through All I Want To, And Be Forced To Learn Wildflowers At Last, To Keep Awake.

The Mind Wants The World To Return Its Love, Or Its Awareness; The Mind Wants To Know All The World, And All Eternity, And God.

The Mind Wants To Live Forever, Or To Learn A Very Good Reason Why Not. The Mind Wants The World To Return Its Love, Or Its Awareness... The Mind's Sidekick, However, Will Settle For Two Eggs Over Easy. The Dear, Stupid Body Is Easily Satisfied As A Spaniel. And, Incredibly, The Simple Spaniel Can Lure The Brawling Mind To Its Dish. It Is Everlastingly Funny That The Proud, Metaphysically Ambitious Mind Will Hush If You Give It An Egg.

I Am A Frayed And Nibbled Survivor In A Fallen World, And I Am Getting Along. I Am Aging And Eaten And Have Done My Share Of Eating Too. I Am Not Washed And Beautiful, In Control Of A Shining World In Which Everything Fits, But Instead Am Wondering Awed About On A Splintered Wreck I've Come To Care For, Whose Gnawed Trees Breathe A Delicate Air, Whose Bloodied And Scarred Creatures Are My Dearest Companions, And Whose Beauty Bats And Shines Not In Its Imperfections But Overwhelmingly In Spite Of Them.

I Would Like To Live. . . Open To Time And Death Painlessly, Noticing Everything, Remembering Nothing, Choosing The Given With A Fierce And Pointed Will.

About Five Years Ago I Saw A Mockingbird Make A Straight Vertical Descent From The Roof Gutter Of A Four-story Building. It Was An Act As Careless And Spontaneous As The Curl Of A Stem Or The Kindling Of A Star.

If You Stay Still, Earth Buries You, Ready Or Not.

Fiction Keeps Its Audience By Retaining The World As Its Subject Matter. People Like The World. Many People Actually Prefer It To Art And Spend Their Days By Choice In The Thick Of It.

It Has Always Been A Happy Thought To Me That The Creek Runs On All Night, New Every Minute, Whether I Wish It Or Know It Or Care, As A Closed Book On A Shelf Continues To Whisper To Itself Its Own Inexhaustible Tale.

When I Was Quite Young I Fondly Imagined That All Foreign Languages Were Codes For English. I Thought That "hat," Say, Was The Real And Actual Name Of The Thing, But That People In Other Countries, Who Obstinately Persisted In Speaking The Code Of Their Forefathers, Might Use The Word "ibu," Say, To Designate Not Merely The Concept Hat, But The English Word "hat." I Knew Only One Foreign Word, "oui," And Since It Had Three Letters As Did The Word For Which It Was A Code, It Seemed, Touchingly Enough, To Confirm My Theory.

I Think It Would Be Well, And Proper, And Obedient, And Pure, To Grasp Your One Necessity And Not Let It Go, To Dangle From It Limp Wherever It Takes You.

Caring Passionately About Something Isn't Against Nature, And It Isn't Against Human Nature. It's What We're Here To Do.

I Think The Dying Pray At The Last Not "please," But "thank You," As A Guest Thanks His Host At The Door.

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.

You Search, You Break Your Heart, Your Back, Your Brain, And Then-and Only Then-it Is Handed To You.

The Way We Live Our Days, Is The Way We Live Our Lives.

According To Inuit Culture In Greenland, A Person Possesses Six Or Seven Souls. The Souls Take The Form Of Tiny People Scattered Throughout The Body.

There Is No Such Thing As An Artist: There Is Only The World Lit Or Unlit As The Light Allows. When The Candle Is Burning, Who Looks At The Wick? When The Candle Is Out, Who Needs It?

Whenever There Is Stillness There Is The Still Small Voice, God's Speaking From The Whirlwind, Nature's Old Song, And Dance.

No One Escapes The Wilderness On The Way To The Promised Land.

We Live In All We Seek.

Nothing On Earth Is More Gladdening Than Knowing We Must Roll Up Our Sleeves And Move Back The Boundaries Of The Humanly Possible Once More.

It's A Little Silly To Finally Learn How To Write At This Age. But I Long Ago Realized I Was Secretly Sincere.

Love So Sprang At Her, She Honestly Thought No One Had Ever Looked Into It. Where Was It In Literature? Someone Would Have Written Something. She Must Not Have Recognized It. Time To Read Everything Again.

It Makes More Sense To Write One Big Book - A Novel Or Nonfiction Narrative - Than To Write Many Stories Or Essays. Into A Long, Ambitious Project You Can Fit Or Pour All You Possess And Learn.

A Work In Progress Quickly Becomes Feral. It Reverts To A Wild State Overnight. It Is Barely Domesticated, A Mustang On Which You One Day Fastened A Halter, But Which Now You 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 Must Visit It Every Day And Reassert Your 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!

Your Feelings Are None Of Your Business.

None Of Your Business

For Writing A First Draft Requires From The Writer A Peculiar Internal State Which Ordinary Life Does Not Induce. ... How To Set Yourself Spinning?

Self-consciousness Is The Curse Of The City And All That Sophistication Implies.

I Had Been My Whole Life A Bell, And Never Knew It Until At That Moment I Was Lifted And Struck.

We Are Here On The Planet Only Once, And Might As Well Get A Feel For The Place.

I Would Like To Learn, Or Remember, How To Live.

I Am A Frayed And Nibbled Survivor In A Fallen World, And I Am Getting Along. I Am Aging And Eaten And Have Done My Share Of Eating Too.

We Have Not Yet Encountered Any God Who Is As Merciful As A Man Who Flicks A Beetle Over On Its Feet.

Our Life Is A Faint Tracing On The Surface Of 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

Who And Of What Import Were The Men Whose Bones Bulk The Great Wall, The Thirty Million Mao Starved, Or The Thirty Million Children Not Yet Five Who Die Each Year Now? Why, They Are The Insignificant Others, Of Course; Living Or Dead, They Are Just Some Of The Plentiful Others...and You? To What End Were We Billions Of Oddballs Born?

Books Swept Me Away, This Way And That, One After The Other; I Made Endless Vows According To Their Lights For I Believed Them.

Then Why Did You Tell Me?

I Had Hopes For My Rough Edges. I Wanted To Use Them As A Can Opener, To Cut Myself A Hole In The World's Surface And Exit Through It.

A Schedule Is A Mock-up Of Reason And Order - Willed, Faked, And So Brought Into Being.

I Noticed This Process Of Waking, And Predicted With Terrifying Logic That One Of These Years Not Far Away I Would Be Awake Continuously And Never Slip Back, And Never Be Free Of Myself Again.

The Novel Is A Game Or Joke Shared Between Author And Reader.

I Worked So Hard All My Life, And All I Want To Do Now Is Read.

Like Everyone In His Right Mind, I Feared Santa Claus.

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