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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.

-Annie Dillard

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Nature Is, Above All,

Annie Dillard

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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.

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

The Painter... Does Not Fit The Paints To The World. He Most Certainly Does Not Fit The World To Himself. He Fits Himself To The Paint. The Self Is The Servant Who Bears The Paintbox And Its Inherited Contents.

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

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

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

Our Family Was On The Lunatic Fringe. My Mother Was Always Completely Irrepressible. My Father Made Crowd Noises Into A Microphone.

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

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 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 Body Of Literature, With Its Limits And Edges, Exists Outside Some People And Inside Others. Only After The Writer Lets Literature Shape Her Can She Perhaps Shape Literature.

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

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

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

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.

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 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.

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. 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.

I'd Seen A Great Many Partial Eclipses, But A Partial Eclipse Has The Same Relation To A Total Eclipse As Flirting With A Man Does To Marrying Him. It's Completely Different.

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

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 Witness The Creation And To Abet It.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

We Wake, If Ever At All, To Mystery.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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

At A Certain Point, You Say To The Woods, To The Sea, To The Mountains, The World, Now I Am Ready. Now I Will Stop And Be Wholly Attentive. You Empty Yourself And Wait, Listening.

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

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

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.

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

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

People Who Take Photographs During Their Whole Vacation Won't Remember Their Vacation. They'll Only Remember What Photographs They Took.

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

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

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.

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

These Are Our Few Live Seasons. Let Us Live Them As Purely As We Can, In The Present.

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.

Are You Living Just A Little And Calling That Life?

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.

It Could Be That Our Faithlessness Is A Cowering Cowardice Born Of Our Very Smallness, A Massive Failure Of Imagination... If We Were To Judge Nature By Common Sense Or Likelihood, We Wouldnt Believe The World Existed.

Write About Winter In The Summer.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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 Extravagant Gesture Is The Very Stuff Of Creation.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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

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.

Put Yourself Out Of Your Misery.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

The Dedicated Life Is Worth Living. You Must Give With Your Whole Heart.

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.

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.

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.

We Are Here To Witness The Creation And To Abet It. We Are Here To Notice Each Thing So Each Thing Gets Noticed. Together We Notice Not Only Each Mountain Shadow And Each Stone On The Beach But, Especially, We Notice The Beautiful Faces And Complex Natures Of Each Other. 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. We Witness Our Generation And Our Times. We Watch The Weather. Otherwise, Creation Would Be Playing To An Empty House.

Beauty And Grace Are Performed Whether Or Not We Sense Them.

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

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.

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

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?

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.

The Silence Is All There Is. It Is The Alpha And The Omega, It Is God's Brooding Over The Face Of The Waters; It Is The Blinded Note Of The Ten Thousand Things, The Whine Of Wings. You Take A Step In The Right Direction To Pray To This Silence, And Even To Address The Prayer To "world." Distinctions Blur. Quit Your Tents. Pray Without Ceasing.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Write As If You Are Dying.

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.

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.

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

Learn Punctuation; It Is Your Little Drum Set, One Of The Few Tools Oyu Have To Signal The Reader Where The Beats And Emphases Go. (if You Get It Wrong, Any Least Thing, The Editor Will Throw Your Manuscript Out.) Punctuation Is Not Like Musical Notation; It Doesn't Indicate The Length Of Pauses, But Instead Signifies Logical Relations. There Are All Sorts Of People Out There Who Know These Things Very Well. You Have To Be Among Them Even To Begin.

He Is Careful Of What He Reads, For That Is What He Will Write. He Is Careful Of What He Learns, For That Is What He Will Know.

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

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

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.

Your Feelings Are None Of Your Business.

None Of Your Business

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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?

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

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

Push It. Examine All Things Intensely And Relentlessly.

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

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

Then Why Did You Tell Me?

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

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.

As Soon As Beauty Is Sought Not From Religion And Love, But For Pleasure, It Degrades The Seeker.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Landscape Consists In The Multiple, Overlapping Intricacies And Forms That Exist In A Given Space At A Moment In Time.

Just Once I Wanted A Task That Required All The Joy I Had. Day After Day I Had Noticed That If I Waited Long Enough, My Strong Unexpressed Joy Would Dwindle And Dissipate Inside Me, Like A Fire Subsiding . . . . Just This Once I Wanted To Let It Rip.

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

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?

I Couldn't Unpeach The Peaches.

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.

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

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

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

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

A Writer Looking For Subjects Inquires Not After What He Loves Best, But After What He Alone Loves At All.

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

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.

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

Doing Something Does Not Require Discipline. It Creates Its Own Discipline - With A Little Help From Caffeine.

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

Poetry Has Been Able To Function Quite Directly As Human Interpretation Of The Raw, Loose Universe. It Is A Mixture, If You Will, Of Journalism And Metaphysics, Or Of Science And Religion.

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.

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.

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.

You Can't Test Courage Cautiously.

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

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 Surest Sign Of Age Is Loneliness.

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 Pulitzer Is More Useful Than Meaningful.

The Irrational Haunts The Metaphysical.

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.

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

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.

We Still And Always Want Waking.

The Real And Proper Question Is: Why Is It Beautiful?

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

If Even Rock Was Interesting, If Even This Ugliness Was Worth Whole Shelves At The Library, Required Sophisticated Tools To Study, And Inspired Grown Men To Crack Mountains And Saw Crystals--then What Wasn't?

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.

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Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

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