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"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."
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"The whole order of things is as outrageous as any miracle which could presume to violate it."
"It will no doubt be agreed that there are multitudes of these defiant, aggressive types in our culture. But they do not frequent psychoanalysts' offices because our competitive culture (in which, to a considerable extent, the individual who can aggressively exploit others without conscious guilt feeling is 'succesful') supports and 'cushions' them to a greater extent than the opposite types. It is generally the culturally 'weak' individuals who get to the psychoanalyst; for in cultural terms they have the 'neurosis' and the succesfully agressive person does not."
"In every civilized society, there is an established institution put in place to design laws that make people live civilized and having rights and privileges as citizens of that nation."
"Just like it is in the life of an individual or an organization, one of the catalysts of progress is discipline and order."
"The main goal of organizing people is to make them laborers."
"I wasn't sleeping on the streets at night. Of course, there were a lot of good people sleeping in the streets. They weren't fools, they just didn't fit into the needed machinery of the moment. And those needs kept altering."
"If you want to have a well-ordered church, then you have to become well-ordered yourself."
"Always be organized in adding value."
"Time is the chronological breakdown of life."
"Discipline is needed in our family lives."
Explore more quotes by Annie Dillard
"People love pretty much the same things best. A writer looking for subject inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all."
"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."
"The writer studies literature, not the world. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck."
"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."
"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."
"Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?"
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