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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.

-Annie Dillard

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The Body Of Literature,

Annie Dillard

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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.

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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.

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.

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.

But Enough Is Enough. One Turns At Last Even From Glory Itself With A Sigh Of Relief. From The Depths Of Mystery, And Even From The Heights Of Splendor, We Bounce Back And Hurry For The Latitudes Of Home.

I 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

We Live In All We Seek.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

The Interior Life Is Often Stupid.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Finding Yourself

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

As A Thinker I Keep Discovering That Beauty Itself Is As Much A Fact, And A Mystery...i Consider Nature's Facts -- Its Beautiful And Grotesque Forms And Events -- In Terms Of The Import To Thought And Their Impetus To The Spirit. In Nature I Find Grace Tangled In A Rapture With Violence; I Find An Intricate Landscape Whose Forms Are Fringed In Death; I Find Mystery, Newness, And A Kind Of Exuberant, Spendthrift Energy.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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 Courage Of Children And Beasts Is A Function Of Innocence.

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

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.

We Wake, If Ever At All, To Mystery.

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.

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.

On Plenty Of Days The Writer Can Write Three Or Four Pages, And On Plenty Of Other Days He Concludes He Must Throw Them Away.

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

Remembers Everything

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

The 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.

Put Yourself Out Of Your Misery.

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?

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

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

Are You Living Just A Little And Calling That Life?

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Your Work Is To Keep Cranking The Flywheel That Turns The Gears That Spin The Belt In The Engine Of Belief That Keeps You And Your Desk In Midair.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

I 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.

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

Write As If You Are Dying.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

I Couldn't Unpeach The Peaches.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Irrational Haunts The Metaphysical.

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.

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

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.

There Must Be Bands Of Enthusiasts For Everything On Earth-fanatics Who Shared A Vocabulary, A Batch Of Technical Skills And Equipment, And, Perhaps, A Vision Of Some Single Slice Of The Beauty And Mystery Of Things, Of Their Complexity, Fascination, And Unexpectedness.

The World Knew You Before You Knew The World.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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?

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Cruelty Is A Mystery, And A Waste Of Pain.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

[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.

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

Then Why Did You Tell Me?

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

We Still And Always Want Waking.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Write About Winter In The Summer.

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

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