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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.

-Annie Dillard

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The Point Of The

Annie Dillard

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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.

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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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Skin Was Earth; It Was Soil. I Could See, Even On My Own Skin, The Joined Trapezoids Of Dust Specks God Had Wetted And Stuck With His Spit The Morning He Made Adam From Dirt. Now, All These Generations Later, We People Could Still See On Our Skin The Inherited Prints Of The Dust Specks Of Eden.

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

The Surest Sign Of Age Is Loneliness.

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.

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

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 Couldn't Unpeach The Peaches.

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.

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

Push It. Examine All Things Intensely And Relentlessly.

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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?

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Remembers Everything

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

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

There Are No Events But Thoughts And The Heart's Hard Turning, The Heart's Slow Learning Where To Love And Whom. The Rest Is Merely Gossip, And Tales For Other Times.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

If You Stay Still, Earth Buries You, Ready Or 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.

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.

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.

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

The Irrational Haunts The Metaphysical.

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

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

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!

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

After The One Extravagant Gesture Of Creation In The First Place, The Universe Has Continued To Deal Exclusively In Extravagances, Flinging Intricacies And Colossi Down Aeons Of Emptiness, Heaping Profusions On Profligacies With Ever-fresh Vigor. The Whole Show Has Been On Fire From The Word Go. I Come Down To The Water To Cool My Eyes. But Everywhere I Look I See Fire; That Which Isn't Flint Is Tinder, And The Whole World Sparks And Flames.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Finding Yourself

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.

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 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.

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

You Can't Test Courage Cautiously.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Our Life Is A Faint Tracing On The Surface Of Mystery, Like The Idle Curved Tunnels Of Leaf Miners On The Face Of A Leaf. We Must Somehow Take A Wider View, Look At The Whole Landscape, Really See It, And Describe What's Going On Here. Then We Can At Least Wail The Right Question Into The Swaddling Band Of Darkness, Or, If It Comes To That, Choir The Proper Praise.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

We 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.

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

Your Feelings Are None Of Your Business.

None Of Your Business

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 Pulitzer Is More Useful Than Meaningful.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

You 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.

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.

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.

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

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

Write As If You Are Dying.

Dan Gerber Is One Of Our Finest Living Poets.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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?

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.

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

Cruelty Is A Mystery, And A Waste Of Pain.

The Interior Life Is Often Stupid.

We Wake, If Ever At All, To Mystery.

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

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.

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.

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

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

In Literary History, Generation Follows Generation In A Rage.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

The World Knew You Before You Knew The World.

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

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.

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

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

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 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.

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?

I Wake Expectant, Hoping To See A New Thing.

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.

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

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.

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