You can serve or you can sing, and wreck your heart in prayer, working the world's hard work.

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.

Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.

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.

What I sought in books was imagination. It was depth, depth of thought and feeling; some sort of extreme of subject matter; some nearness to death; some call to courage. I myself was getting wild; I wanted wildness, originality, genius, rapture, hope. ... What I sought in books was a world whose surfaces, whose people and events and days lived, actually matched the exaltation of the interior life. There you could live.

I woke at intervals until . . . the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not.

Just once I wanted a task that required all the joy I had. Day after day I had noticed that if I waited long enough, my strong unexpressed joy would dwindle and dissipate inside me, like a fire subsiding . . . . Just this once I wanted to let it rip.