Quotes About Growth

I didn't know how to be a parent. Most of what I did, I remembered from what she used to do. I made enough mistakes on any one day to scar him for life. My only hope was that all the errors somehow canceled each other out.

Exponential growth inside a finite system leads to collapse.

What we care for, we will grow to resemble. And what we resemble will hold us, when we are us no longer. . . .

When is the next best time? Now.' " "Ah! Okay!" The smile turns real. Until today, he has never planted anything. But Now, that next best of times, is long, and rewrites everything.

He stands near the planting, its black ring of soil like a promise at his feet.

But practice pares back the impossible

pronounced. Spontaneous improvement no longer seemed likely. Behavioral therapy had

imaginable: free loot for the finding, combined with the joy of leveling up.

The hills cast a shadow on themselves, bruise-blue turning to forgetful black. High up, [...] rocky outcrops crawl with manzanita, shedding their curling, crimson barks. Bay laurels rim the logger-made meadows. Canyons thicken with orange madrone peeling to creamy, clammy green. Coast live oaks [...] gather on the crags. And down in cool ripatian corridors smelling of silt and decaying needles, redwoods work a plan that will take a thousand years to realize [...]

He tells her, on their drives, about all the oblique miracles that green can devise.

Un figlio scopre sempre le debolezze dei propri genitori. Le percepisce prima ancora delle parole, come una prima e ultima lezione. La debolezza può essere l'unica lezione dei genitori destinata a durare nel tempo. (p. 247)

The game's best AIs are smarter than last year's interplanetary probes. Play becomes the engine of human growth. But

He says there's nothing on Earth he can give to her, for their anniversary, to thank her for what she has given him. Nothing, except for a thing that grows.

Not everything we plant will take. Not every plant will thrive. But together we can watch the ones that do fill up our garden.

NO TO THE SUICIDE ECONOMY

Teaching is like photosynthesis: making food from air and light. It tilts the prospects for life a little.

The things she catches Doug-firs doing, over the course of these years, fill her with joy. When the lateral roots of two Douglas-firs run into each other

Yet still this tree has a secret tucked into the thin, living cylinder beneath its bark. Its cells obey an ancient formula: Keep still. Wait. Something in the lone survivor knows that even the ironclad law of Now can be outlasted. There's work to do. Star-work, but earthbound all the same.

Nothing anyone can do for anyone, except to recall: We are every second being born.

You have given me a thing I could never have imagined, before I knew you. It's like I had the word "book," and you put one in my hands. I had the word "game," and you taught me how to play. I had the word "life," and then you came along and said, "Oh! You mean this.

The past tries to kill her—all the people they were or had hoped to be.

Best time to plant a tree? Twenty years ago." "Yep. And you always said the next best time was now." "Wrong. Next best time, nineteen years ago.

Noisy aspens and remnant birches, forests of cottonwoods and poplars, take up the chorus: The world is turning into a new thing.

It had been a long day, and the thing he wanted to know would take ten years of coursework to grasp. But a child's question was the start of all things.