Quotes About Progress

While she was becoming, everyone grew up and became.

the end is simply the beginning of an even longer story.

Overnight everyone has grown up. While she was becoming, everyone grew up and became.

Early in the morning, late in the century, Cricklewood Broadway.

We were the first generation to have, in our own homes, the means to re- and forward-wind reality: even very small children could press their fingers against those clunky buttons and see what-has-been become what-is or what-will-be.

To look back at all past work induces nausea [...] It's like taking a tour of a cell in which you were once incarcerated.

But the lesson I take from this is not that the lives in that novel were illusory but rather that progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and reimagined if it is to survive.

My mind does not easily accept stately historical processions.

I thought of that William Gibson quote: "The future is already here—it's just not evenly distributed yet.

In the Chalfen lexicon the middle classes were the inheritors of the enlightenment, the creators of the welfare state, the intellectual elite and the source of all culture.

It's so funny how many people today really believe themselves to be the most advanced people who ever lived, 'the arc of history bending towards justice' or whatever the quote is. To me, being attendant to history is a kind of resistance. It offers the possibility of alternative worlds, that there is a reality outside the one we are living in.

I can't rid myself of the need to do "something," to make "something," to feel that this new expanse of time hasn't been "wasted.

Neither my readers nor I are in the relatively sunlit uplands depicted in White Teeth anymore. But the lesson I take from this is not that the lives in that novel were illusory, but rather that progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and *reimagined* if it is to survive.

In the case of On Beauty, my OPD spun completely out of control: I reworked those first twenty pages for almost two years. To look back at all past work induces nausea, but the first twenty pages in particular bring on heart palpitations. It's like taking a tour of a cell in which you were once incarcerated.

In a vision, Irie has seen a time, a time not far from now, when roots won't matter any more because they can't because they mustn't because they're too long and they're too tortuous and they're just buried too damn deep. She looks forward to it.

We will never be perfect: that is our limitation.

I am a citizen as well as an individual soul and one of the things citizenship teaches us, over the long stretch, is that there is no perfectibility in human affairs.

At a certain point you have to leave childish things behind, and one of the childish things is a sense that 'Wow, I can draw' or in my case 'Wow, I can read'... You feel you have what's called a talent, but as you become an adult, if you hope to make things, you have to give up the preoccupation with talent otherwise you'll spend your life painting beautiful pictures of fruit bowls that look like fruit bowls.

People like us, we can't be nostalgic. We've no home in the past. Nostalgia is a luxury.

We have to take care of the moment and then move on to the next. We can't worry about what's to come.

Men rise on steppin'-stones of their dead selves to higher things!...

Ta ksi??­ka Å'a­god­nie mnie na­po­mi­na nie po­zwa­la bym zbyt szyb­ko biegÅ' w takt to­czÄ…­cej siÄ™ fra­zy ka?e wró­ci? do po­czÄ…t­ku wci?? za­czy­na? od nowa

It is a paradox of human dynamics, of how the progress of new ideas often rests on the survival of old ways.

You don't have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great