Annie Dillard: Living

“She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.”

“The dedicated life is the life worth living. You must give with your whole heart.”

“She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live. She read books as one would breathe ether, to sink in and die.”

“We live in all we seek.”

“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.”

“These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.”

“I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you're going no matter how you live, cannot you part.”

“There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by.”

“I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.”

“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.”

“Any three-year-old can see how unsatisfactory and clumsy is this whole business of reproducing and dying by the billions. We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet. There is not a people in the world that behaves as badly as praying mantises. But wait, you say, there is no right and wrong in nature; right and wrong is a human concept. Precisely: we are moral creatures, then, in an amoral world. The universe that suckled us is a monster that does not care if we live or die—does not care if it itself grinds to a halt. 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 skins.”