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So The Midwest Nourishes Us [...] And Presents Us With The Spectacle Of A Land And A People Completed And Certain. And So We Run To Our Bedrooms And Read In A Fever, And Love The Big Hardwood Trees Outside The Windows, And The Terrible Midwest Summers, And The Terrible Midwest Winters [...]. And So We Leave It Sorrowfully, Having Grown Strong And Restless By Opposing With All Our Will And Mind And Muscle Its Simple, Loving, Single Will For Us: That We Stay, That We Stay And Find A Place Among Its Familiar Possibilities. Mother Knew We Would Go; She Encouraged Us.

-Annie Dillard

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So The Midwest Nourishes

Annie Dillard

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So The Midwest Nourishes Us [...] And Presents Us With The Spectacle Of A Land And A People Completed And Certain. And So We Run To Our Bedrooms And Read In A Fever, And Love The Big Hardwood Trees Outside The Windows, And The Terrible Midwest Summers, And The Terrible Midwest Winters [...]. And So We Leave It Sorrowfully, Having Grown Strong And Restless By Opposing With All Our Will And Mind And Muscle Its Simple, Loving, Single Will For Us: That We Stay, That We Stay And Find A Place Among Its Familiar Possibilities. Mother Knew We Would Go; She Encouraged Us.

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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.

Are You Living Just A Little And Calling That Life?

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

There Was Only Silence. It Was The Silence Of Matter Caught In The Act And Embarrassed. There Were No Cells Moving, And Yet There Were Cells. I Could See The Shape Of The Land, How It Lay Holding Silence. Its Poise And Its Stillness Were Unendurable, Like The Ring Of The Silence You Hear In Your Skull When You're Little And Notice You're Living The Ring Which Resumes Later In Life When You're Sick.

Hone And Spread Your Spirit Till You Yourself Are A Sail, Whetted, Translucent, Broadside To The Merest Puff.

The Sense Impressions Of One-celled Animals Are Not Edited For The Brain. This Is Philosophically Interesting In A Rather Mournful Way, Since It Means That Only The Simplest Animals Perceive The Universe As It Is.

Cruelty Is A Mystery, And A Waste Of Pain.

At Night I Read And Write, And Things I Have Never Understood Become Clear; I Reap The Harvest Of The Rest Of The Year's Planting

Ecstasy, I Think, Is A Soul's Response To The Waves Holiness Makes As It Nears.

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

The Mind Of The Writer Does Indeed Do Something Before It Dies, And So Does Its Owner, But I Would Be Hard Put To Call It Living.

There Is No Whit Less Enlightenment Under The Tree By Your Street Than There Was Under The Buddha's Bo Tree. I Invite You To Go Sit Under That Tree By Your Street.

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

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.

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.

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.

Wherever We Go, There Seems To Be Only One Business At Hand - That Of Finding Workable Compromises Between The Sublimity Of Our Ideas And The Absurdity Of The Fact Of Us.

People Who Read Are Not Too Lazy To Turn On The Television; They Prefer Books.

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.

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?

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

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?

Push It. Examine All Things Intensely And Relentlessly.

We Are Here To Witness. There Is Nothing Else To Do With Those Mute Materials We Do Not Need. Until Larry Teaches His Stone To Talk, Until God Changes His Mind, Or Until The Pagan Gods Slip Back To Their Hilltop Groves, All We Can Do With The Whole Inhuman Array Is Watch It.

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.

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

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

Every Book Has An Intrinsic Impossibility, Which Its Writer Discovers As Soon As His First Excitement Dwindles.

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

Having Chosen This Foolishness, I Was A Free Being. How Could The World Ever Stop Me, How Could I Betray Myself, If I Was Not Afraid?

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.

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.

What Could You Say To A Dying Person That Would Not Enrage By Its Triviality?

Why Are We Reading If Not In Hope That The Writer Will Magnify And Dramatize Our Days, Will Illuminate And Inspire Us With Wisdom, Courage, And The Possibility Of Meaningfulness, And Will Press Upon Our Minds The Deepest Mysteries, So That We May Feel Again Their Majesty And Power? What Do We Ever Know That Is Higher Than That Power Which, From Time To Time, Seizes Our Lives, And Reveals Us Startlingly To Ourselves As Creatures Set Down Here Bewildered?

The Pulitzer Is More Useful Than Meaningful.

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

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

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 Real And Proper Question Is: Why Is It Beautiful?

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

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!

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

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

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

No Child On Earth Was Ever Meant To Be Ordinary, And You Can See It In Them, And They Know It, Too, But Then The Times Get To Them, And The Wear Out Their Brains Learning What Folks Expect, And Spend Their Strength Trying To Rise Over Those Same Folks.

I Don't Know What It Is About Fecundity That So Appalls. I Suppose It Is The Teeming Evidence That Birth And Growth, Which We Value, Are Ubiquitous And Blind, That Life Itself Is So Astonishingly Cheap, That Nature Is As Careless As It Is Bountiful, And That With Extravagance Goes A Crushing Waste That Will One Day Include Our Own Cheap Lives.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

She Read Books As One Would Breathe Air, To Fill Up And Live.

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

Theirs Is The Mystery Of Continuous Creation And All That Providence Implies: The Uncertainty Of Vision, The Horror Of The Fixed, The Dissolution Of The Present, The Intricacy Of Beauty, The Pressure Of Fecundity, The Elusiveness Of The Free, And The Flawed Nature Of Perfection.

We Live In All We Seek.

I Alternate Between Thinking Of The Planet As Home - Dear And Familiar Stone Hearth And Garden - And As A Hard Land Of Exile In Which We Are All Sojourners.

He Judged The Instant And Let Go; He Flung Himself Loose Into The Stars.

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.

The Irrational Haunts The Metaphysical.

I Had Been Chipping At The World Idly, And Had By Accident Uncovered Vast And Labyrinthine Further Worlds Within It.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Life Of Sensation Is The Life Of Greed; It Requires More And More. The Life Of The Spirit Requires Less And Less.

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.

I Had Good Innings, As The British Say. I Wrote For 38 Years At The Top Of My Form, And I Wanted To Quit On A High Note.

The Interior Life Is Often Stupid.

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.

Those Of Us Who Read Carried Around With Us Like Martyrs A Secret Knowledge, A Secret Joy, And A Secret Hope: There Is A Life Worth Living Where History Is Still Taking Place; There Are Ideas Worth Dying For, And Circumstances Where Courage Is Still Prized.

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

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 Feel As Though I Stand At The Foot Of An Infinitely High Staircase, Down Which Some Exuberant Spirit Is Flinging Tennis Ball After Tennis Ball, Eternally, And The One Thing I Want In The World Is A Tennis Ball.

Write About Winter In The Summer.

A Shepherd On A Hilltop Who Looks At A Mess Of Stars And Thinks, ‘there’s A Hunter, A Plow, A Fish,’ Is Making Mental Connections That Have As Much Real Force In The Universe As The Very Fires In Those Stars Themselves.

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.

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.

I Saw In A Blue Haze All The World Poured Flat And Pale Between The Mountains

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.

The Way You Live Your Days Is The Way You Live Your Life.

How We Spend Our Days Is, Of Course, How We Spend Our Lives. What We Do With This Hour And With That One, Is What We Are Doing.

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.

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.

Then Why Did You Tell Me?

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.

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.

If I Actually Believed That The Progress Of Human Understanding Depended On Our Crop Of Contemporary Novelists, I Would Shoot Myself.

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.

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.

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

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.

The World Knew You Before You Knew The World.

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.

I Cannot Cause Light; The Most I Can Do Is Try To Put Myself In The Path Of Its Beam.

In Literary History, Generation Follows Generation In A Rage.

Nothing Moves A Woman So Deeply As The Boyhood Of The Man She Loves.

The Universe That Suckled Us Is A Monster That Does Not Care If We Live Or Die--it Does Not Care If It Itself Grinds To A Halt. It Is A Beast Running On Chance And Death, Careening From Nowhere To Nowhere. It Is Fixed And Blind, A Robot Programmed To Kill. We Are Free And Seeing; We Can Only Try To Outwit It At Every Turn To Save Our Lives.

Nowhere To Turn

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

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

Write As If You Are Dying.

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

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.

Time Is The Warp And Matter The Weft Of The Woven Texture Of Beauty In Space, And Death Is The Hurling Shuttle.

Noticing And Remembering Everything Would Trap Bright Scenes To Light And Fill The Blank And Darkening Past Which Was Already Piling Up Behind Me. The Growing Size Of That Blank And Ever-darkening Past Frightened Me; It Loomed Beside Me Like A Hole In The Air And Battened On Scraps Of My Life I Failed To Claim. If One Day I Forgot To Notice My Life, And Be Damned Grateful For It, The Blank Cave Would Suck Me Up Entire.

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

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.

The Morning Woods Were Utterly New. A Strong Yellow Light Pooled Beneath The Trees; My Shadow Appeared And Vanished On The Path, Since A Third Of The Trees I Walked Under Were Still Bare, A Third Spread A Luminous Haze Wherever They Grew, And Another Third Blocked The Sun With New, Whole Leaves. The Snakes Were Out - I Saw A Bright, Smashed One On The Path - And The Butterflies Were Vaulting And Furling About; The Phlox Was At Its Peak, And Even The Evergreens Looked Greener, Newly Created And Washed.

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.

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

Let The Grass Die. I Let Almost All Of My Indoor Plants Die From Neglect While I Was Writing The Book. There Are All Kinds Of Ways To Live. You Can Take Your Choice. You Can Keep A Tidy House, And When St. Peter Asks You What You Did With Your Life, You Can Say, I Kept A Tidy House, I Made My Own Cheese Balls.

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 Think That The Dying Pray At The Last Not Please But Thank You, As A Guest Thanks His Host At The Door. Falling From Airplanes The People Are Crying Thank You, Thank You, All Down The Air; And The Cold Carriages Draw Up For Them On The Rocks.

Whenever An Encounter Between A Writer Of Good Will And A Regular Person Of Good Will Happens To Touch On The Subject Of Writing, Each Person Discovers, Dismayed, That Good Will Is Of No Earthly Use. The Conversation Cannot Proceed.

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.

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

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

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

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.

The Extravagant Gesture Is The Very Stuff Of Creation.

It Should Surprise No One That The Life Of The Writer - Such As It Is - Is Colorless To The Point Of Sensory Deprivation. Many Writers Do Little Else But Sit In Small Rooms Recalling The Real World.

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

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.

How We Spend Our Days Is, Of Course, How We Spend Our Lives.

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.

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

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.

Hasidism Has A Tradition That One Of Man's Purposes Is To Assist God In The Work Of Redemption By "hallowing" The Things Of Creation. By A Tremendous Heave Of His Spirit, The Devout Man Frees The Divine Sparks Trapped In The Mute Things Of Time; He Uplifts The Forms And Moments Of Creation, Bearing Them Aloft Into That Rare Air And Hallowing Fire In Which All Clays Must Shatter And Burst. Keeping The Subsoil World Under Trees In Mind, In Intelligence, Is The Least I Can Do.

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

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.

You Are Wrong If You Think That You Can In Any Way Take The Vision And Tame It To The Page. The Page Is Jealous And Tyrannical; The Page Is Made Of Time And Matter; The Page Always Wins.

When You Write, You Lay Out A Line Of Words. Soon You Find Yourself Deep In New Territory.

Finding Yourself

Take A Quick Dip, Relax With A Schnapps And A Sandwich, Stretch Out, Have A Smoke, Take A Nap Or Just Rest, And Then Sit Around And Chat Until Three. Then I Hunt Some More Until Sundown, Bathe Again, Put On White Tie And Tails To Keep Up Appearances, Eat A Huge Dinner, Smoke A Cigar And Sleep Like A Log Until The Sun Comes Up Again To Redden The Eastern Sky. This Is Living…. Could It Be More Perfect?

I Couldn't Unpeach The Peaches.

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

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

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

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.

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.

There Is Always The Temptation In Life To Diddle Around Making Itsy-bitsy Friends And Meals And Journeys For Years On End. It Is All So Self Conscience, So Apparently Moral...but I Won't Have It. The World Is Wilder Than That In All Directions, More Dangerous...more Extravagant And Bright. We Are...raising Tomatoes When We Should Be Raising Cain, Or Lazarus.

I Work Mornings Only. I Go Out To Lunch. Afternoons I Play With The Baby, Walk With My Husband, Or Shovel Mail.

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

Put Yourself Out Of Your Misery.

The Written Word Is Weak. Many People Prefer Life To It. Life Gets Your Blood Going, & It Smells Good. Writing Is Mere Writing, Literature Is Mere. It Appeals Only To The Subtlest Senses—the Imagination’s Vision, & The Imagination’s Hearing—& The Moral Sense, & The Intellect. This Writing That You Do, That So Thrills You, That So Rocks & Exhilarates You, As If You Were Dancing Next To The Band, Is Barely Audible To Anyone Else.

[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.

When You Open A Book,” The Sentimental Library Posters Said, “anything Can Happen.” This Was So. A Book Of Fiction Was A Bomb. It Was A Land Mine You Wanted To Go Off. You Wanted It To Blow Your Whole Day. Unfortunately, Hundreds Of Thousands Of Books Were Duds. They Had Been Rusting Out Of Everyone’s Way For So Long That They No Longer Worked. There Was No Way To Distinguish The Duds From The Live Mines Except To Throw Yourself At Them Headlong, One By One.

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.

There Is No Shortage Of Good Days. It Is Good Lives That Are Hard To Come By. A Life Of Good Days Lived In The Senses Is Not Enough. The Life Of Sensation Is The Life Of Greed; It Requires More And More. The Life Of The Spirit Requires Less And Less; Time Is Ample And Its Passage Sweet. Who Would Call A Day Spent Reading A Good Day? But A Life Spent Reading -- That Is A Good Life.

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.

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

I Never Met A Man Who Was Shaken By A Field Of Identical Blades Of Grass. An Acre Of Poppies And A Forest Of Spruce Boggle No One's Mind.

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.

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

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.

As A Life's Work, I Would Remember Everything - Everything, Against Loss. I Would Go Through Life Like A Plankton Net.

Remembers Everything

We Are Here To Bring To Consciousness The Beauty And Power That Are Around Us And To Praise The People Who Are Here With Us.

The Creative Process Obtains In All Creative Acts. So If I'm Painting Suddenly I'll See Something That I Didn't See Before.

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

When I Was Six Or Seven Years Old, Growing Up In Pittsburgh, I Used To Take A Precious Penny Of My Own And Hide It For Someone Else To Find. I Was Greatly Excited At The Thought Of The First Lucky Passerby Who Would Receive A Gift In This Way, Regardless Of Merit, A Free Gift From The Universe. . . . I've Been Thinking About Seeing. There Are Lots Of Things To See, Unwrapped Gifts And Free Surprises. The World Is Fairly Studded And Strewn With Pennies Cast Broadside From A Generous Hand.

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.

I Woke In Bits, Like All Children, Piecemeal Over The Years. I Discovered Myself And The World, And Forgot Them, And Discovered Them Again.

Our Life Is A Faint Tracing On The Surface Of Mystery.

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

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

What I Sought In Books Was Imagination. It Was Depth, Depth Of Thought And Feeling; Some Sort Of Extreme Of Subject Matter; Some Nearness To Death; Some Call To Courage. I Myself Was Getting Wild; I Wanted Wildness, Originality, Genius, Rapture, Hope. ... What I Sought In Books Was A World Whose Surfaces, Whose People And Events And Days Lived, Actually Matched The Exaltation Of The Interior Life. There You Could Live.

We Wake, If Ever At All, To Mystery.

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

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

The Creatures I Seek Do Not Want To Be Seen.

If We Listened To Our Intellect, We’d Never Have A Love Affair... Or Go Into Business. You’ve Got To Jump Off Cliffs And Build Your Wings On The Way Down.

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

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

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.

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

The Point Of Going Somewhere Like The Napo River In Ecuador Is Not To See The Most Spectacular Anything. It Is Simply To See What Is There.

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.

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.

An Eskimo Shaman Said, Life's Greatest Danger Lies In The Fact That Man's Food Consists Entirely Of Souls.

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.

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.

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.

Your Feelings Are None Of Your Business.

None Of Your Business

There Is A Muscular Energy In Sunlight Corresponding To The Spiritual Energy Of Wind.

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

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 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

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

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

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

Beauty And Grace Are Performed Whether Or Not We Sense 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.

The Mountains Are Great Stone Bells; They Clang Together Like Nuns. Who Shushed The Stars? There Are A Thousand Million Galaxies Easily Seen In The Palomar Reflector; Collisions Between And Among Them Do, Of Course, Occur. But These Collisions Are Very Long And Silent Slides. Billions Of Stars Sift Amont Each Other Untouched, Too Distant Even To Be Moved, Heedless As Always, Hushed. The Sea Pronounces Something, Over And Over, In A Hoarse Whisper; I Cannot Quite Make It Out. But God Knows I Have Tried.

Dan Gerber Is One Of Our Finest Living Poets.

Writers Serve As The Memory Of A People. They Chew Over Our Public Past.

We Are Here To Witness The Creation And To Abet 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. 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.

When I Teach, I Preach. I Thump The Bible. I Exhort My Students Morally. I Talk To Them About The Dedicated Life.

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.

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