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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.

-Annie Dillard

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Theirs Is The Mystery

Annie Dillard

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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.

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Are You Living Just A Little And Calling That Life?

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

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

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

There Is 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.

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.

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

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

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

Cruelty Is A Mystery, And A Waste Of Pain.

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

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

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.

The Extravagant Gesture Is The Very Stuff Of Creation.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Remembers Everything

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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'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.

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.

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.

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

We Wake, If Ever At All, To Mystery.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Put Yourself Out Of Your Misery.

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

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.

Write About Winter In The Summer.

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.

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

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.

The Mind Itself Is An Art Object. It Is A Mondrian Canvas Onto Whose Homemade Grids It Fits Its Own Preselected Products. Our Knowledge Is Contextual And Only Contextual. Ordering And Invention Coincide: We Call Their Collaboration Knowledge.

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

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.

Peeping Through My Keyhold I See Within The Range Of Only About 30 Percent Of The Light That Comes From The Sun; The Rest Is Infrared And Some Little Ultraviolet, Perfectly Apparent To Many Animals, But Invisible To Me. A Nightmare Network Of Ganglia, Charged And Firing Without My Knowledge, Cuts And Splices What I See, Editing It For My Brain. Donald E. Carr Points Out That The Sense Impressions Of One-celled Animals Are Not Edited For The Brian: 'this Is Philosophically Interesting In A Rather Mournful Way, Since It Means That Only The Simplest Animals Perceive The Universe As It Is.

I 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.

When I Walk With A Camera, I Walk From Shot To Shot, Reading The Light On A Calibrated Meter. When I Walk Without A Camera, My Own Shutter Opens, And The Moment's Light Prints On My Own Silver Gut. When I See This Second Way I Am Above All An Unscrupulous Observer.

We Still And Always Want Waking.

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

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

Dan Gerber Is One Of Our Finest Living Poets.

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

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

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.

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

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 You Spend Your Days Is How You Spend Your Life.

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

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

Push It. Examine All Things Intensely And Relentlessly.

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

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.

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.

The Interior Life Is Often Stupid.

The Irrational Haunts The Metaphysical.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

We Live In All We Seek.

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

Finding Yourself

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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?

A Schedule Defends From Chaos And Whim. It Is A Net For Catching Days. It Is A Scaffolding On Which A Worker Can Stand And Labor With Both Hands At Sections Of Time.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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 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 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.

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

The Mind Wants To Live Forever, Or To Learn A Very Good Reason Why Not. The Mind Wants The World To Return Its Love, Or Its Awareness... The Mind's Sidekick, However, Will Settle For Two Eggs Over Easy. The Dear, Stupid Body Is Easily Satisfied As A Spaniel. And, Incredibly, The Simple Spaniel Can Lure The Brawling Mind To Its Dish. It Is Everlastingly Funny That The Proud, Metaphysically Ambitious Mind Will Hush If You Give It An Egg.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

She Is Nine, Beloved, As Open-faced As The Sky And As Self-contained. I Have Watched Her Grow. As Recently As Three Or Four Years Ago, She Had A Young Child's Perfectly Shallow Receptiveness; She Fitted Into The World Of Time, It Fitted Into Her, As Thoughtlessly As Sky Fits Its Edges, Or A River Its Banks. But As She Has Grown, Her Smile Has Widened With A Touch Of Fear And Her Glance Has Taken On Depth. Now She Is Aware Of Some Of The Losses You Incur By Being Here--the Extortionary Rent You Have To Pay As Long As You Stay.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

In Literary History, Generation Follows Generation In A Rage.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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 Surest Sign Of Age Is Loneliness.

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?

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Like Any Child, I Slid Into Myself Perfectly Fitted, As A Diver Meets Her Reflection In A Pool. Her Fingertips Enter The Fingertips On The Water, Her Wrists Slide Up Her Arms. The Diver Wraps Herself In Her Reflection Wholly, Sealing It At The Toes, And Wears It As She Climbs Rising From The Pool, And Ever After.

The World Did Not Have Me In Mind; It Had No Mind. It Was A Coincidental Collection Of Things And People, Of Items, An I Myself Was One Such Item...the Things In The World Did Not Necessarily Cause My Overwhelming Feelings; The Feelings Were Inside Me, Beneath My Skin, Behind My Ribs, Withing My Skull. They Were Even, To Some Extent, Under My Control.

It's About Waking Up. A Child Wakes Up Over And Over Again, And Notices That She's Living. She Dreams Along, Loving The Exuberant Life Of The Senses, In Love With Beauty And Power, Oblivious To Herself -- And Then Suddenly, Bingo, She Wakes Up And Feels Herself Alive. She Notices Her Own Awareness. And She Notices That She Is Set Down Here, Mysteriously, In A Going World.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

I Come Down To The Water To Cool My Eyes. But Everywhere I Look I See Fire; That Which Isn't Flint Is Tinder, And The Whole World Sparks And Flames.

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

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.

Who And Of What Import Were The Men Whose Bones Bulk The Great Wall, The Thirty Million Mao Starved, Or The Thirty Million Children Not Yet Five Who Die Each Year Now? Why, They Are The Insignificant Others, Of Course; Living Or Dead, They Are Just Some Of The Plentiful Others...and You? To What End Were We Billions Of Oddballs Born?

You Do Not Have To Sit Outside In The Dark. If, However, You Want To Look At The Stars, You Will Find That Darkness Is Necessary. But The Stars Neither Require Nor Demand It.

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.

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

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

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.

The Pulitzer Is More Useful Than Meaningful.

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

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

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

You Can't Test Courage Cautiously.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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