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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?

-Annie Dillard

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Take A Quick Dip,

Annie Dillard

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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?

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

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

Push It. Examine All Things Intensely And Relentlessly.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

What Have We Been Doing All These Centuries But Trying To Call God Back To The Mountain, Or, Failing That, Raise A Peep Out Of Anything That Isn't Us? What Is The Difference Between A Cathedral And A Physics Lab? Are Not They Both Saying: Hello? We Spy On Whales And On Interstellar Radio Objects; We Starve Ourselves And Pray Till We're Blue.

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.

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

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

Finding Yourself

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

Write About Winter In The Summer.

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

[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.

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

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

Painters Work From The Ground Up. The Latest Version Of A Painting Overlays Earlier Versions, And Obliterates Them. Writers, On The Other Hand, Work From Left To Right. The Discardable Chapters Are On The Left.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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 Do Not So Much Write A Book As Sit Up With It, As A Dying Friend. I Hold Its Hand And Hope It Will Get Better.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Remembers Everything

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

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

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.

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.

Dan Gerber Is One Of Our Finest Living Poets.

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

The Mind Itself Is An Art Object ... The Mind Is A Blue Guitar On Which We Improvise The Song Of The 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.

The Extravagant Gesture Is The Very Stuff Of Creation.

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.

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.

Aim For The Chopping Block. If You Aim For The Wood, You Will Have Nothing. Aim Past The Wood, Aim Through The Wood; Aim For The Chopping Block.

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.

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.

Your Feelings Are None Of Your Business.

None Of Your Business

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

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.

Put Yourself Out Of Your Misery.

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

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.

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

Cruelty Is A Mystery, And A Waste Of Pain.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

A Schedule Defends From Chaos And Whim. A Net For Catching Days.

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.

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

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

Are You Living Just A Little And Calling That Life?

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

You Empty Yourself And Wait, Listening. After A Time You Hear It: There Is Nothing There...you Feel The World's Word As A Tension, A Hum, A Single Chorused Note Everywhere The Same. This Is It: This Hum Is The Silence.

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.

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 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.

We Still And Always Want Waking.

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

I Wake Expectant, Hoping To See A New Thing.

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

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

The Creatures I Seek Do Not Want To Be Seen.

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

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

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.

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 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.

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

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. 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

We Are Here To Abet Creation And To Witness To It, To Notice Each Other's Beautiful Face And Complex Nature So That Creation Need Not Play To An Empty House.

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

We Wake, If Ever At All, To Mystery.

Last Forever!' Who Hasn't Prayed That Prayer? You Were Lucky To Get It In The First Place. The Present Is A Freely Given Canvas. That It Is Constantly Being Ripped Apart And Washed Downstream Goes Without Saying.

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

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

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.

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

Art Is Like An Ill-trained Labrador Retriever That Drags You Out Into Traffic.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

Write As If You Are Dying.

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

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

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

I Couldn't Unpeach The Peaches.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Divinity Is Not Playful. The Universe Was Not Made In Jest But In Solemn Incomprehensibl E Earnest. By A Power That Is Unfathomably Secret, And Holy, And Fleet. There Is Nothing To Be Done About It, But Ignore It, Or See.

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.

The Surest Sign Of Age Is Loneliness.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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 Wake, If We Ever Wake At All, To Mystery, Rumors Of Death, Beauty, Violence.

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

Then Why Did You Tell Me?

The Sensation Of Writing A Book Is The Sensation Of Spinning, Blinded By Love And Daring. It Is The Sensation Of A Stunt Pilot's Turning Barrel Rolls, Or An Inchworm's Blind Rearing From A Stem In Search Of A Route. At Its Worst, It Feels Like Alligator Wrestling, At The Level Of The Sentence.

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

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

You Can't Test Courage Cautiously.

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

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

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

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