Quotes About Progress

Dicen que ninguno de nosotros cambia realmente con el paso del tiempo, que sólo nos volvemos más como somos.

Y es que es el alma de la humanidad la que a través de los siglos se dirige hacia la perfección, la raza humana la que cada año que pasa aprende a amar mejor y a perdonar. Yo estoy anclada en el pasado por cadenas que no puedo romper.

I am...unfinished.

Only in complexity do we find answers. Through complexity men struggle towards fairness; it is slow and clumsy, but it's the only way. Simplicity demands too great a sacrifice. It always has.

How can this magnificent modern world enter into war? How can these modern people who know so much, who've come so far, suddenly be on the attack against one another?

Anne Rivers Siddons

The real adventure, he thought, is the flow of time; it's as much adventure as anyone could wish.

What's the point of living if you don't try to do things better?

those who forget the past tend to regret the future

It was her first inkling that her generation was part of the stream of time. Just like the others ahead of them, they would grow up and grow old and die. Already there was a younger generation prodding them from behind.

They knew all about Jin-Ho because Jin-Ho's mother had telephoned two weeks after the babies' arrival. "I hope you don't mind my tracking you down," she'd said. "You're the only Yazdans in the book and I just couldn't resist calling you to find out how things were going." Jin-Ho, it seemed, was doing marvelously.

level where

Except for an occassional Sunday, they don't make days like they used to. I mean they don't make them whole anymore..........Days seem to come in pieces now. They used to be in blocks-all one solid color to them.

And sometimes, he said, you get to what you thought was the end and you find it's a whole new beginning.

The trouble is I'm reversible. You're hardly alive if you're reversible as I am.......But the irreversible people' they get some place. Good or bad.

Sometimes people live first one life and then another life

Finally Reverend Emmett asked, 'Shall we walk on?' So they did. They passed a lone man waiting at a bus stop, a shopkeeper locking up his store. Each footstep, Ian felt, led him closer to something important. He was acutely conscious all at once of motion, of flux and possibility. He felt he was an arrow - not an arrow shot by God but an arrow heading toward God, and if it took every bit of this only life he had, he believed that he would get there in the end.

See, I've always pictured life as one of those ladders you find on playground sliding boards—a sort of ladder of years where you climb higher and higher, and then, oops!, you fall over the edge and others move up behind you. I keep asking myself: couldn't Thelma have found us a place with a few more levels to it?

if you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not.

There is neither a proportional relationship, nor an inverse one, between a writer's estimation of a work in progress & its actual quality. The feeling that the work is magnificent, & the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged.

Nothing on earth is more gladdening than knowing we must roll up our sleeves and move back the boundaries of the humanly possible once more.

I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend. During visiting hours, I enter its room with dread and sympathy for its many disorders. I hold its hand and hope it will get better. This tender relationship can change in a twinkling. If you skip a visit or two, a work in progress will turn on you.

If she[…] had known how much her first half-inch beginning to let go would take - and how long her noticing and renouncing owning and her turning her habits, and beginning the slimmest self-mastery whose end was nowhere in sight - would she have begun?

Necessity is the mother of invention