Quotes About Progress

keep trying to find a way to become what I'd like to be

There's a saying: "Time heals all wounds.

Well, Anne, you still have a lot to learn. It's time you made a beginning, instead of looking down at other people and always blaming them!

Lajos had said that every 7 years a human being is completely changed, and Hella thinks that is perfectly true. Thank goodness, in 6 1/2 months I shall change my whole being too.

Hoe heerlijk is het, dat niemand een minuut hoeft te wachten met te beginnen de wereld langzaam te doen veranderen''.

Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.

Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something—anything—down on paper. What I've learned to do when I sit down to work on a shitty first draft is to quiet the voices in my head.

I pray not to be such a whiny, self-obsessed baby, and give thanks that I am not quite as bad as I used to be (talk about miracles). Then something comes up, and I overreact and blame and sulk, and it feels like I haven't made any progress at all. But it turns out I'm less of a brat than before, and I hit the reset button much sooner, shake it off, and get my sense if humor back.

Anne Lamott's priest friend Tom, how to get through: Left foot, right foot, left foot, breathe, he said. Right foot, left foot, right foot, breathe. Salon April 25, 2003

Becoming a better writer is going to help you become a better reader, and that is the real payoff.

A hundred years from now? All new people.

You have to keep taking the next necessary stitch, and the next one, and the next. Without stitches, you just have rags. And we are not rags.

It's incredibly touching when someone who seems so hopeless finds a few inches of light to stand in and makes everything work as well as possible. All of us lurch and fall, sit in the dirt, are helped to our feet, keep moving, feel like idiots, lose our balance, gain it, help others get back on their feet, and keep going.

Addicts and alcoholics will tell you that their recovery began when they woke up in pitiful and degraded enough shape to take Step Zero, which is: Ã¢â'¬Å"This shit has got to stop.

Say to yourself in the kindest possible way, Look, honey, all we're going to do for now is to write a description of the river at sunrise, or the young child swimming in the pool at the club, or the first time the man sees the woman he will marry. That is all we are going to do for now. We are just going to take this bird by bird. But we are going to finish this one short assignment.

Growing up is not going nearly as efficiently as I had hoped.

Bird by bird buddy. Just take it bird by bird.

But easy's like, who cares? Easy's like, how much is easy going to get you?

Usually with life, you start wherever you are, and you flail around for a while--

By the end I was deteriorating faster than I could lower my standards.

What seems true is that something in life, on the highways or in our hearts, is always being installed, or being repaired, or being torn down for the next installation.

Holiness has most often been revealed to me in the exquisite pun of the first syllable, in holes- in not enough help, in brokenness, mess. High holy places, with ethereal sounds and stained glass, can massage my illusion of holiness, but in holes and lostness I can pick up the light of small ordinary progress, newly made moments flecked like pepper into the slog and the disruptions.

This is how we make important changes-- barely, poorly, slowly.

Now, practically even better news than that of short assignments is the idea of shitty first drafts. All good writers write them.