Silence and Waiting

Found in my journal for August, 2003, just before I left for my first summer at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference:

I have put on silence and waiting.
                 — Annie Dillard, “An Expedition to the Pole,” in Teaching a Stone to Talk

Some weather’s coming; you can taste on the sides of your toungue a quince tang in the air.
                 — Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.
                 — Dillard in The Writing Life

August is a time of answers, a time that without nudging turns the world plain and clear.
                 — Tom Fricke,
                     “Next Year Country,” an essay about working the land in the Dakotas
                      in Doubletake, Spring 2003

How the past perishes is how the future becomes.
                 — Alfred North Whitehead

Don’t think — write.
                 — Madeleine L’Engle

Poetry is not window cleaning. It breaks the glass.
                 — Chase Twichell

A writer with a fixed idea is like a goose trying to lay a stone.
                 — Nancy Willard