Quotes About Progress

If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.

So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it's the hardest to do anything with. That's about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what.

This is the middle of my life, I think of it as a place, like the middle of a river, the middle of a bridge, halfway across, halfway over. I'm supposed to have accumulated things by now: possessions, responsibilities, achievements, experience and wisdom. I'm supposed to be a person of substance.

the difference between stupid and ignorant was that ignorant could learn.

So much better to travel than to arrive.

I am certain that a Sewing Machine would relieve as much human suffering as a hundred Lunatic Asylums, and possibly a good deal more.

We want to get there faster. Get where? Wherever we are not. But a human soul can only go as fast as a man can walk, they used to say. In that case, where are all the souls? Left behind. They wander here and there, slowly, dim lights flickering in the marshes at night, looking for us. But they're not nearly fast enough, not for us, we're way ahead of them, they'll never catch up. That's why we can go so fast: our souls don't weigh us down.

What is your favorite word?" "And. It is so hopeful.

If you don't like it, change it, we said, to each other and to ourselves. And so we would change for the man, for another one. Change, we were sure, was for the better always. We were revisionists; what we revised was ourselves.

It's better that way, and I am a great proponent of better. In the absence of best.

As we know from the study of history, no new system can impose itself upon a previous one without incorporating many of the elements to be found in the latter...

Everything is post these days, as if we're all just a footnote to something earlier that was real enough to have a name of its own.

But the adjectives change," said Jimmy. "Nothing's worse than last year's adjectives.

You take the first step, and to save yourself from the consequences, you take the next one. In times like ours, there are only two directions: up or plummet.

We were revisionists; what we revised was ourselves.

Don't cry anymore, she tells herself. Just do one thing at a time. Get from hour to hour and day to day like a frog jumping on lily pads.

Fear is synonymous with the future, and the future consists of forked roads, I should say forking roads, because the roads are forking all the time, like slow lightning. A road is a process, not a location.

You young people don't appreciate things, she'd say. You don't know what we had to go through, just to get you where you are. Look at him, slicing up the carrots. Don't you know how many women's lives, how many women's bodies, the tanks had to roll over just to get that far?

What people want is perfection, said the man. In themselves. But they need the steps to it to be pointed out, said the woman. In a simple order, said the man. With encouragement, said the woman. And a positive attitude.

Better never means better for everyone, he says. It always means worse, for some.

A road is a process, not a location.

But I have already told the beginning, so right now it's the middle. And Zeb is in the middle of the story about Zeb. He is in the middle of his own story. I am not in this part of the story; it hasn't come to the part with me. But I'm waiting, far off in the future. I'm waiting for the story of Zeb to join up with mine. The story of Toby. The story I am in right now, with you.

When you are in the middle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion;

How strange to remember typewriters, with their jammed keys and snarled ribbons and the smudgy carbon paper for copies.