Quotes About Progress

The only way you can write is by the light of the bridges burning behind you

I was getting long in the leg but still short on experience.

That's the way people is who ain't goin' anyplace in life theirselves. They don't want you goin' anyplace either.

It assumes that better means faster. By those standards, a typewriter is nothing but a very bad computer.

To Save Time is to Lengthen Life," proclaimed the Remington Typewriter Company.

To solve the future, we must save the past. My simple rule of thumb, then, is this: when you cut down a tree, what you make from it should be at least as miraculous as what you cut down.

The web: yet another total disorientation that becomes status quo without anyone realizing it.

Still, history is the long process of outsourcing human ability in order to leverage more of it.

Like evolution, it reuses all the old, successful parts of everything that has come before. Like evolution, it just means unfolding.

Don't worry if your job is small and your rewards are few. Even the mighty Ironwood was once a nut, like you.

Do you run away or toward?

Trees fall with spectacular crashes. But planting is silent and growth is invisible.

Yes! And what do all good stories do?" There are no takers. Neelay holds up his arms and extends his palms in the oddest gesture. In another moment, leaves will grow from his fingers. Birds will come and nest in them. "They kill you a little. They turn you into something you weren't.

memory is always a collaboration in progress.

A good answer must be reinvented many times, from scratch.

The day would come when the last clean cause and effect would disappear into thickets of tangled networks.

By the time an ash has made a baseball bat, a chestnut has made a dresser.

If the past is older than the present, then the future must be younger. And we must all go backward with each passing year.

The most wondrous products of four billion years of life need help.

But then, everything on Earth was changing him. Every aggressive word from a friend over lunch, every click on his virtual farm, every species he painted, each minute of every online clip, all the stories he read at night and all the ones I told him: there was no "Robin," no one pilgrim in this procession of selves for him ever to remain the same as. The whole kaleidoscopic pageant of them, parading through time and space, was itself a work in progress.

People want to grow. Expand their empires. That's why they pay us every month. The place fills in. We make it a little bigger. There's no other way to run a world.

The trees thicken like enchanted things. Chestnut is quick: By the time an ash has made a baseball bat, a chestnut has made a dresser. Bend over to look at a sapling, and it'll put your eye out.

Her breakthrough comes as breakthroughs often do: by long and prepared accident.

High above Adam's prison, new creatures sweep up into satellite orbit and back down to the planet's surface, obeying the old, first hungers, the primal commands - look, listen, taste, touch, feel, say, join. They gossip to one other, these new species, exchanging discoveries, as living code has exchanged itself from the beginning. They begin to link up, to fuse together, to merge their cells and form small communities. There's no saying what they might become, in seventy plus seventy years.