Schedules. Super important.

I have been looking into schedules. Even when we read physics, we inquire of each least particle, What then shall I do this morning? 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 afterwards as a blurred and powerful pattern...There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading-that is a good life. A day that closely resembles every other day of the past ten or twenty years does not suggest itself as a good one. But who would not call Pasteur's life a good one, or Thomas Mann's?


Annie Dillard, "The Writing Life"

more Adam Bede...

Get out of bed!
"He had been awake an hour, and could rest in bed no longer. In bed our yesterdays are too oppressive: if a man can only get up, though it be but to whistle or to smoke, he has a present which offers some resistance to the past—sensations which assert themselves against tyrannous memories."

On assessing beautiful women:"Oh, that is one of the matters in which old bachelors are wiser than married men, because they have time for more general contemplation. Your fine critic of women must never shackle his judgment by calling one woman his own;..."

On enjoying bad habits:"it was the last weakness he meant to indulge in; and a man never lies with more delicious languor under the influence of a passion, than when he has persuaded himself that he shall subdue it tomorrow."

George Eliot, Adam Bede

some Adam Bede...

Blind Love:
People who love downy peaches are apt not to think of the stone, and sometimes jar their teeth terribly against it. -George Eliot

Education:
But I'll not throw away good knowledge on people who think they can get it by the sixpenn'orth, and carry it away with 'em as they would an ounce of snuff. So never come to me again, if you can't show that you've been working with your own heads, instead of thinking you can pay for mine to work for you. That's the last word I've got to say to you. -George Eliot, Adam Bede

Social Events cause stress, but working all day is better!:
"I'd sooner ha' brewin' day and washin' day together than one o' these pleasurin' days. There's no work so tirin' as danglin' about an' starin' an' not rightly knowin' what you're goin' to do next; an' keepin' your face i' smilin' order like a grocer o' market-day, for fear people shouldna think you civil enough. An' you've nothing to show for't when it's done, if it isn't a yallow face wi' eatin' things as disagree." -George Eliot, Adam Bede

Even George Eliot thought spelling was terrible...

"It had cost Adam a great deal of trouble, ... — to get the mastery of his pen, and write a plain hand, to spell without any other mistakes than must in fairness be attributed to the unreasonable character of orthography rather than to any deficiency in the speller..." -Adam Bede

Joy.

The life you are meant to find will wring your heart to the point of breaking and then douse you with buckets of joy when you're not looking. --- Linford Detweiler

Annie Dillard's For The Time Being

"Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves. All we need is to imagine our ability to love developing until it embraces the totality of men and the earth." Pierre Teilhard de Chardin as read in Dillard's book.

"[The Labor and Delivery Unit of the hospital is] the wildest deep sea vent on earth…where the people come out"

“The very least likely things for which God might be responsible are what insurers call ‘acts of God.'" (of course this quote depends on your theology, but it's funny nonetheless.)

On writing letters. ha.

...the image of paul bent over his page, filling it with inky letters, illuminated by a flickering oil lamp, is a judgement on anyone who has ever claimed to have "no time to write,"... Cahill page 130 "Desire of the Everlasting Hills"