Quotes About Process

There's a line between revision and fretting, just working it to death." —Toni Morrison

I am interested in what prompts and makes possible this process of entering what one is estranged from—and in what disables the foray, for purposes of fiction, into corners of the consciousness self off and away from the reach of the writer's imagination.

Struggling through the work is extremely important—more important to me than publishing it.

privatization reverses a centuries-long process whereby the state took on things that individuals could not or would not do.

Make a mess. Clean it up.

When people tell their stories again and again, turning them over and over, they're trying to make or find meaning in them. That meaning is something they have to discover for themselves. As painful as the process might be, there is no circumnavigating it, either with the most thoughtful ideas you can offer or with the most hackneyed clichés. The meaning a person finds will almost never be the same one you can come up with. It will always be richer, more nuanced, more surprising.

We should be so aware of sin and its wrongness that the minute we see our sin we quickly move through the process of repentance. Remember, though, that the prayer must be more than just a cry for help in time of crisis–the prayer must reflect a heart that desires to change.

The key to real change lies not in implementing a new process, but in getting people to hold one another accountable to the process.

When it comes to automation, IT process consultants usually warn organization not to automate a new process before you have had practice running it with pencil and paper.

Everybody wants success in something, whether it's in work, love, play, finances, family, or an inner struggle. But success doesn't come instantly. Life has a process of rejecting you to test you and prepare you to win.

I've seen too many writers derail their creative process by stopping the action to tweak a word or a sentence. If you write a few paragraphs, then go back and polish them, you destroy all the forward momentum you had. It's like shifting gears—forward, reverse, forward, reverse. You could burn out your mental transmission. If you can train yourself to save the criticism for the second draft, you'll actually finish writing and have something to polish.

Because of technology everything we make is always in the process of becoming. Every kind of thing is becoming something else, while it churns from "might" to "is." All is flux. Nothing is finished. Nothing is done. This never-ending change is the pivotal axis of the modern world.

A distributed, decentralized network is more a process than a thing. In the logic of the Net there is a shift from nouns to verbs.

Our existence here, he says, is a case of "not we the accidental but we the expected." Mathematician Manfred Eigen wrote in 1971, "The evolution of life, if it is based on a derivable physical principle, must be considered an inevitable process.

Protopia is a state of becoming, rather than a destination. It is a process. In the protopian mode, things are better today than they were yesterday, although only a little better. It is incremental improvement or mild progress.

problem detection method

Great art is difficult," Caleb said. After a few moments, he said, "But I don't understand why it has to be so difficult sometimes.

These weird thoughts come into my head, and I don't even really want to think about it, but I can't let go of it until I take it as far as I can, until I reach some kind of ending, and then I can move on. That's what writing is like for me.

While improvement in your habits and actions is a life-long process, the desire to achieve it can thus be sparked in a moment.

Fluxus explored art as a process, using the viewer, or the audience, to complete the work. It asked, What can art be?

In any medium, I also start out assuming—even planning—that I'll delete the first thing I do, whether it's a paragraph or the first few rows of a scarf. That makes those first steps far less precious and therefore less intimidating.

Utopia is the process of making a better world, the name for one path history can take, a dynamic, tumultuous, agonizing process, with no end. Struggle forever.

I think the success of democracy is not really police security it's the presence of a broad middle class. The stronger the middle class of a people is, the less you have to worry about one group coming in and exploiting the democratic process for its own ends.

We may succeed, but if we lose what is best in us in the process, what have we won?