Quotes About Progress

If you want to have loving feelings today, do loving things: Flirt with everyone, especially old people and yourself. Pick up some litter in your neighborhood, even though there will be more by Sunday. Get your work done, one inadequate sentence and paragraph at a time. Then go through your draft and take out all the lies and boring parts. Left foot, right foot, left foot, breathe.....Those are the things I am going to do today.

I felt changed and a little crazy. But though I was still like a stained and slightly buckled jigsaw puzzle with some pieces missing, now there were at least a few border pieces in place.

writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way." You don't have to see where you're going, you don't have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice about writing, or life, I have ever heard.

We live stitch by stitch, when we're lucky. If you fixate on the big picture, the whole shebang, the overview, you miss the stitching.

You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice about writing, or life, I have ever heard. So

I get up. I walk. I fall down. Meanwhile, I keep dancing.

First find a path, and a little light to see by. Then push up your sleeves and start helping.

writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

In the face of everything, we slowly come through.

We live stitch by stitch, when we're lucky.

If we stay where we are, where we're stuck, where we're comfortable and safe, we die there. We become like mushrooms, living in the dark, with poop up to our chins. If you want to know only what you already know, you're dying. You're saying: Leave me alone; I don't mind this little rathole. It's warm and dry. Really, it's fine.

Jesus is big on people evolving. And all organisms have an innate tendency to evolve toward improvement. I seem to be the outlier.

Science, art, community, and nature make manifest that bad will or mistakes can lead to progress, like Bob Ross on his show The Joy of Painting reminding us that when we make big mistakes on canvas, we can turn them into birds—"Yeah, they're birds now!

I was waiting for the kind of solution where God reaches down and touches you with his magic wand and all of a sudden I would be fixed, like a broken toaster oven. But this was not the way it happened. Instead, I got one angstrom unit better, day by day.

The first draft is the down draft - you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft - you fix it up.

But where do we even start on the daily walk of restoration and awakening? We start where we are.

we thought were castles turn out to be prisons, and we desperately want out, but even though we built them, we can't find the door. Yet maybe if you ask God for help in knowing which direction to face, you'll have a moment of intuition. Maybe you'll see at least one next right step you can take.

Step Zero, which is: Ã¢â'¬Å"This shit has got to stop.

You can't logically get from where we were to where we are now. I think that is what they mean by grace.

Just take it bird by bird

New is life.

E. L. Doctorow once said that "writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

If I were God, I'd have the answers at the end of the workbook, so you could check to see if you're on the right track as you go along.

This is not a bad line to have taped to the wall of your office. 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.