Quotes About Process

I feel pretty good about it so far, but it's been a little harder to write than I'd hoped.

writing stories, scenes, and portraits is a very inductive process and will lead you to new insights and new points of view you couldn't reach by reasoning alone.

If you separate the writing process into two stages, you can exploit these opposing muscles one at a time: first be loose and accepting as you do fast early writing; then be critically toughminded as you revise what you have produced. What you'll discover is that these two skills used alternately don't undermine each other at all, they enhance each other.

I feel it is part of the mystery of faith that things normally do not line up entirely, and so when they don't, it is not a signal to me that the journey is at an end but that I am still on it. As I reflect on my own experience and that of many others far wiser than I, God seems willing to help that process along.

Doubt signals not God's death but the need for our own—to die to the theology we hold to with clenched fists. Our first creeping feelings of doubt are like the distant toll of a graveyard chapel, alerting us that the dying process is coming our way.

Physical death is the final letting go that we all experience with loved ones and that we will ourselves experience one day. Dying now the way Jesus says to means letting go already of every comfort, familiarity, joy, and sorrow—and of the false sense of control those things give us. Letting go of these things is a dying process. Jesus sounds more like a mystic than an intellectual lining up correct thinking.

Doubt signals that this process of dying and rising is underway. Though God feels far away, at that moment God may be closer than we realize—especially if "know what you believe" is how we're used to thinking of our faith.

The project didn't deserve this; they were trying to achieve something noble and right with the starship. No piece-of-shit trendy-cause rebel outside the political process had the right to screw with that.

A gun can be dangerous. But a gun can protect you, you can hunt for food with it - you know, the tool itself is a tool. The intention of the party using the tool is a part of the process, right? You know: the knife cuts the steak, stabs the person, saves somebody from danger, cuts somebody out of a car.

Obedience is now just one of the fun ways we say thanks to Him while He drenches us with favor; it naturally flows from our lives. Christianity is not a process in which we earn love; it's a process in which we reflect love.

Little by little I will drive them out ahead of you, until you become fruitful and possess the land.

and because it had not been declared what should be done to him, they placed him in custody.

Remove the dross from the silver, and a vessel for a silversmith will come forth.

Surely caraway is not threshed with a sledge, and the wheel of a cart is not rolled over the cumin. But caraway is beaten out with a stick, and cumin with a rod.

Grain for bread must be ground, but it is not endlessly threshed. Though the wheels of the cart roll over it, the horses do not crush it.

So I went down to the potterís house and saw him working at the wheel.

Night and day he sleeps and wakes, and the seed sprouts and grows, though he knows not how.

All by itself the earth produces a crop—first the stalk, then the head, then grain that ripens within.

“Does our law convict a man without first hearing from him to determine what he has done?”