Annie Dillard: Doing

“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.”

“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 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.”

“Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?”

“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.”

“I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam.”

“Caring passionately about something isn't against nature, and it isn't against human nature. It's what we're here to do.”

“Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.”

“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.”

“Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.”

“On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of the conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. 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 some day and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.”

“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. Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern.”