As if I post a quote a day here. But I digress. This nugget is from page 54 of Annie Dillard’s slim work of genius, The Writing Life. In this particular passage she attempts to explain to a neighbor why, after admitting her hatred of it, she commits to writing at all:
“But I rallied and mustered and said that the idea was to learn things; that you learn a thing and then as a matter of course you learn the next thing, and the next thing…As I spoke he nodded precisely in the way that one nods at the utterances of the deranged.”
