Forward Motion Quotes

If there ever were one moment where everything worked for us, where we lived in harmony and at ease with our natures, then we would still be there. There is no garden to return to, no idyllic perfect childhood, no enwombed state. The Garden of Eden was boring, childhood is a nightmare we should all be grateful to be done with, and your mother smoked while she was pregnant and poisoned you in the womb with artificial sugar substitutes. The best thing any of us can do is just to keep fucking up in a forward motion, and see what comes out of it. ~ Jessa Crispin

Here's the real secret: you can fulfill the commands of the Bible better by falling in love with God than by trying to obey him. It's not that your obedience isn't significant or relevant; it's simply not the center of the wheel. No, the hub of your life is your relationship with God. Your behavior and obedience radiate like spokes from the center of your life and allow you to roll forward. When you try to make your eternal behavior the hub on which you turn, you get stuck. Forward motion must be fueled by love. ~ Chris Hodges

Sometimes the biggest gain in productive energy will come from cleaning the cobwebs, dealing with old business, and clearing the desks - cutting loose debris that's impeding forward motion. ~ David Allen

For me, becoming isn't about arriving somewhere or achieving a certain aim. I see it instead as forward motion, a means of evolving, a way to reach continuously toward a better self. The journey doesn't end. ~ Michelle Obama

Every day, you reinvent yourself. You're always in motion. But you decide every day: forward or backward. ~ James Altucher

Less than 10% of the fuel energy burned in automobiles is translated into forward motion of the vehicle and even then most of this energy is needed to move the vehicle itself, which typically weighs 20 times more than its passengers. ~ David Suzuki

In love everything changes, and continues changing all the time. There is no stillness, no stopped clock of the heart in which the moment of happiness holds forever, but only the constant whirring forward motion of desire and need, rising and falling, falling and rising, full of doubts then certainties that moment by moment change and become doubts again. ~ Niall Williams

Film is so much about that intensity of focus that there always needs to be some tension and some forward motion. The novel goes into a series of lovely observations about the world, but you've got to find the story. ~ Lenny Abrahamson

Some part of her felt that the existence of the bridge depended utterly on forward motion and not thinking too much. ~ Joe Hill

Understanding is better than ignorance. Ignorance, unlike life, unlike narrative, is static. Understanding implies a forward motion, thus the possibility of change. ~ Robert Charles Wilson

The warm humid air of New York clung to the night, unwilling to relinquish its suffocating hold. And yet to Eva, the city had an underlying hum of possibility; a constant forward motion that promised, no matter what, that change was on its way. ~ Kathleen Tessaro

I stood for a while the way I had the first time they left, letting all the knots of fear unclench. Nothing had happened, I told myself. I am perfectly okay. He was just a creepy, horny, not-nice man, and now he's gone. But then I shoved my tent back into my pack, turned off my stove, dumped the almost-boiling water out into the grass, and swished the pot in the pond so it cooled. I took a swig of my iodine water and crammed my water bottle and my damp T-shirt, bra, and shorts back into my pack. I lifted Monster, buckled it on, stepped onto the trail, and started walking northward in the fading light. I walked and I walked, my mind shifting into a primal gear that was void of anything but forward motion, and I walked until walking became unbearable, until I believed I couldn't walk even one more step. And then I ran. ~ Cheryl Strayed

Some men a forward motion love, But I by backward steps would move, And when this dust falls to the urn In that state I came, return. ~ Henry Vaughan

A long time ago he believed that he was above the men chasing him; capitulating to their secret desires and dark fears was what he did to survive, nothing more and nothing less. But now he understood that all that reasoning was nothing more than a self-assessing loop which he had used as a survival mechanism. It had run constantly but never actually went anywhere; like a rat on a flywheel, all action, no forward motion. ~ Brandon Shire

Defeat only happens when you make the decision to stop trying. Because determination works. Steady forward motion, even if it's just a step per week, gets you there. So keep moving, even if it's only a little some weeks. ~ Ken Evoy

The best antidote I have found is to yearn for something. As long as you yearn, you can't congeal: There is a forward motion to yearning. ~ Gail Godwin

Within a decade, the internal combustion engine automobile is likely to look exactly like what it is - a machine that converts gasoline into much more heat than forward motion, a bizarre antiquity. ~ Stephen Petranek

I read and write for character. If I like and can relate to the characters in a story I can enjoy any kind of story. I also want something with a definitive plot - you know, beginning, middle and end--that has forward motion. I don't like series books that leave you hanging after you've finished a book and in my own fiction I try to make sure that there's always an entry point for those who are new to the book as well as long-time readers. ~ Charles De Lint

But Holden suspected there was a lot more to Prax than that. There was a relentless forward motion to the man. The universe might knock him down over and over again, but unless he was dead, he'd just keep getting up and shuffling ahead toward his goal. Holden thought he had probably been a very good scientist. Thrilled by small victories, undeterred by setbacks. Plodding along until he got to where he needed to be. ~ James S.A. Corey

If ... if there is reincarnation, it's about forward motion. It has to be, or else we would all be forever stuck in the past. ~ M.J. Rose

New York, which is founded on forward motion and thus loath to acknowledge its dead, merely causes them to walk, endlessly unsatisfied and unburied, to invade the precincts of supposed progress, to lay chill hands on the heedless present, which does not know how to identify the forces that tug at its rationality. ~ Luc Sante

Look at what you want to change, gather a few people who believe in it like you do, and start moving forward. It's important to remember that you don't always need a destination. Sometimes, you just have to make forward motion. And you absolutely can. ~ Debby Ryan

Keep on moving: any motion is forward motion. You can always course-correct. ~ Daphne Oz

The best defense is great offense ... We fight through our mistakes and failures by maximizing our forward motion. ~ Wayde Goodall

We generally don't leave our mark by lunging from one stunning achievement to the next. Much of our forward motion isn't all that interesting when viewed from day to day. It's only through weighing collective sum of these repeated moments that such a life presses it's profound imprint on the lives of others. ~ Jeff Manion

Creativity is every company's first driver. It's where everything starts, where energy and forward motion originate. Without that first charge of creativity, nothing else can take place. ~ Nolan Bushnell

You know what I like about driving? The forward motion of it, the propulsion of it, like you might go anywhere. ~ Jennifer Niven

On a good day, I view the job [of president] as directing an orchestra. On the dark days, it is more like that of a clutch
engaging the engine to effect forward motion, while taking greater friction. ~ A. Bartlett Giamatti

Theoretical concepts of music and extended techniques are more like seasoning to me; they're not the meal. I like outside music that still has a sense of forward motion and an emotive quality to it. ~ Gerard Cox

To be haunted by past failures or satisfied with past successes is to arrest forward motion. ~ Conrad Hilton

Once the habit is ingrained and you become the starter, the center of the circle, you will find more and more things to notice, to instigate, and to initiate. Momentum builds and you get better at generating it. If you go to bed at night knowing that people are expecting you to initiate things all day the next day, you'll wake up with a list. And as you create a culture of people who are always seeking to connect and improve and poke, the bar gets raised. What might be considered a board-level decision at one of your competitors' companies gets done as a matter of course. What might be reserved for a manager's intervention gets handled at the customer level, saving you time and money (and generating customer joy). This incredibly prosaic idea, the very simple act of initiating, is actually profoundly transformative. Forward motion is a defensible business asset. ~ Seth Godin

Home is in my hair, my lips, my arms, my thighs, my feet and my hands. I am my own home. And when I wake up crying in the morning, thinking of how lonely I am, I pinch my skin, tug at my hair, remind myself that I am alive. Remind myself to step outside and greet the morning. Remind myself that it's all about forward motion. It's all about change. It's all about that elusive state.
Freedom. ~ Diriye Osman

'Plenty of men are good at acquiring money and cars and things, but only a few have real forward motion. You know. Thrust.' ~ Vicki Pettersson

If you think of memory not just as looking back but as being aware of time and how it passes and what the passage of it feels like, then there is something about being in motion that does cause it. Through some sleight of mind, physical forward motion makes time seem visible. Which causes me to think that maybe the unnatural speed of cars and jets actually creates nostalgia. Because the simplest way to block out the strangeness of time passing before your eyes is to fix it in place, to edit it down to monuments or potted plants. Like, ~ Adam Haslett

Mach-5, the speed at which stress can't keep up, is simply forward motion. But it has to be self- propelled. Note that people in cars are still stressed. ~ Jef Mallett

The sea, to be happy, like hearts, must be stirred. ~ Will Advise

March on. Do not tarry. To go forward is to move toward perfection. March on, and fear not the thorns, or the sharp stones on life's path. ~ Kahlil Gibran

But something had already been set in motion, and I wonder and wonder how things would have been if I'd just let that moment pass, the one where our eyes met. If I had just taken Shakti's arm and moved off, letting the electrical jolt that passed between us fade off, letting the girl return to his side, letting fate head off in another direction entirely, where he would have kept his eyes fixed on the girl with the purse or on another girl entirely. ~ Deb Caletti

It was a dead swan. Its body lay contorted on the beach like an abandoned lover. I looked at the bird for a long time. There was no blood on its feathers, no sight of gunshot. Most likely, a late migrant from the north slapped silly by a ravenous Great Salt Lake. The swan may have drowned. I knelt beside the bird, took off my deerskin gloves, and began smoothing feathers. Its body was still limp - the swan had not been dead long. I lifted both wings out from under its belly and spread them on the sand. Untangling the long neck which was wrapped around itself was more difficult, but finally I was able to straighten it, resting the swan's chin flat against the shore. The small dark eyes had sunk behind the yellow lores. It was a whistling swan. I looked for two black stones, found them, and placed them over the eyes like coins. They held. And, using my own saliva as my mother and grandmother had done to wash my face, I washed the swan's black bill and feet until they shone like patent leather. I have no idea of the amount of time that passed in the preparation of the swan. What I remember most is lying next to its body and imagining the great white bird in flight. I imagined the great heart that propelled the bird forward day after day, night after night. Imagined the deep breaths taken as it lifted from the arctic tundra, the camaraderie within the flock. I imagined the stars seen and recognized on clear autumn nights as they navigated south. Imagined their silhouettes passing ~ Terry Tempest Williams

Conversely, bad writers often write in order to forward a cause or enlarge other people's understanding of a contemporary social issue. Any attempt to write fiction in order to make the world a better, fairer place is almost certain to fail. ~ Toby Litt

Cash smiles at them and then turns to face me, leaning forward a little on the bar. His eyes meet mine and one brow rises in that holy mother of hell-sexy way, then he mutters, "You've got one chance to make my mouth water."
I suck in a breath. And chills break out down my arms.
Damn, he's good! ~ M. Leighton

I always thought the purpose of time was to move forward, not backward. ~ Michelle Moran

I look forward to the day when a mongolian idiot, treated biochemically, becomes a successful geneticist. ~ Jerome Lejeune

We Communists never conceal our political views. Definitely and beyond all doubt, our future or maximum program is to carry China forward to socialism and communism. Both the name of our Party and our Marxist world outlook unequivocally point to this supreme ideal of the future, a future of incomparable brightness and splendor. ~ Mao Zedong

All right, silent dark bear with angry frown, tell me more about your land."

He settled back down, picturing it. "I would tend to our land from the moment the sun rose to when it set and then you ...she would tend to me."

He laughed at her expression again. The world of exile camps and the Valley felt very far away, and he wanted to lie there forever.

"Let me tell you about your bride," she said, propping herself up on her elbows.

"Both of you would cultivate the land. You would hold the plow, and she would walk alongside you with the ox, coaxing and singing it forward. A stick in her hand, of course, for she would need to keep both the ox and you in line."

"What would we...that is, my bride and I, grow?"

"Wheat and barley."
"And marigolds."
Her nose crinkled questioningly.

"I would pick them when they bloomed," he said. "And when she called me home for supper, I'd place them in her hair and the contrast would take my breath away."

"How would she call you? From your cottage? Would she bellow, 'Finnikin!'?"

"I'd teach her the whistle. One for day and one for night."

"Ah, the whistle, of course. I'd forgotten the whistle. ~ Melina Marchetta

how often do we forget that there is hope as well, and that we seldom think about hope? We are ready to despair too soon, we are ready to say, 'What's the good of doing anything?' Hope is the virtue we should cultivate most in this present day and age. We have made ourselves a Welfare State, which has given us freedom from fear, security, our daily bread and a little more than our daily bread; and yet it seems to me that now, in this Welfare State, every year it becomes more difficult for anybody to look forward to the future. Nothing is worth-while. Why? Is it because we no longer have to fight for existence? Is living not even interesting any more? We cannot appreciate the fact of being alive. Perhaps we need the difficulties of space, of new worlds opening up, of a different kind of hardship and agony, of illness and pain, and a wild yearning for survival? Oh ~ Agatha Christie

Love works in a circle, for the beloved moves the lover by stamping a likeness, and the lover then goes out to hold the beloved inreality. Who first was the beginning now becomes the end of motion. ~ Thomas Aquinas

They were both fomidable, but they were also the two people he cared most about in the world-Worlds-and he just wanted to carry them safley forward to the future he imagined, in which no one's life was at stake and the hardest decision of any given day might be what to eat for breakfast, or where to make love. ~ Laini Taylor

Whenever you looked forward to anything pleasant you were sure to be more or less disappointed ... that nothing ever came up to your expectations. Well, perhaps that is true. But there is a good side to it too. The bad things don't always come up to your expectations either ... they nearly always turn out ever so much better than you think. ~ L.M. Montgomery

He leans forward and kisses me hard on the mouth.
"Don't ever do that again," I tell him.
"Why? Because you liked it or because you didn't?"
"Both. ~ Rick Yancey

One thing I have come to notice in my life is that recovery for me has not been linear. It's more two steps forward, three back, five forward, two back, so I'm always improving but there are setbacks within the improvement. ~ Jonathan Van Ness

I leave to the militarists the difficult task of trying to explain to us how these wars have served to shape character or to promote the progress of civilization or to achieve the reign of justice on earth. So far, they have not come forward with the explanation. ~ Elie Ducommun

All life pulsates in time to the Earth and our artificial fields cause abnormal reactions in all organisms... Increasing electropollution could set in motion irreversible changes leading to our extinction. ~ Robert O. Becker

Why not admit that my dissatisfaction reveals an excessive ambition, perhaps a megalomaniac delirium? For the writer who wants to annul himself in order to give voice to what is outside him, two paths open: either write a book that could be the unique book, that exhausts the whole in its pages; or write all books, to pursue the whole through its partial images. The unique book, which contains the whole, could only be the sacred text, the total world revealed. But I do not believe totality can be contained in language; my problem is what remains outside, the unwritten, the unwritable. The only way left me is that writing of all books, writing the books of all possible authors.

If I think I must write one book, all the problems of how this book should be and how it should not be block me and keep me from going forward. If, on the contrary, I think that I am writing a whole library, I feel suddenly lightened: I know that whatever I write will be integrated, contradicted, balanced, amplified, buried by the hundreds of volumes that remain for me to write. ~ Italo Calvino

I am in my old room once more, for a little, and I am caught in musing - - how life is a swift motion, a continuous flowing, changing, and how one is always saying goodbye and going places, seeing people, doing things. Only in the rain, sometimes, only when the rain comes, closing in your pitifully small radius of activity, only when you sit and listen by the window, as the cold wet air blows thinly by the back of your neck - only then do you think and feel sick. You feel the days slipping by, elusive as slippery pink worms, through your fingers, and you wonder what you have for your eighteen years, and you think about how, with difficulty and concentration, you could bring back a day, a day of sun, blue skies and watercoloring by the sea. You could remember the sensual observations that made that day reality, and you could delude yourself into thinking - almost - that you could return to the past, and relive the days and hours in a quick space of time. But no, the quest of time past is more difficult than you think, and time present is eaten up by such plaintive searchings. The film of your days and nights is wound up tight in you, never to be re-run - and the occasional flashbacks are faint, blurred, unreal, as if seen through falling snow. Now, you begin to get scared. You don't believe in God, or a life-after-death, so you can't hope for sugar plums when your non-existent soul rises. You believe that whatever there is has got to come from man, and man is pretty creative i ~ Sylvia Plath

The pictures that were coming from Vietnam were showing us what was really happening on the ground level. It was in contradiction to what our political and military leaders were telling us. They were straight forward documentary images. A powerful indictment of the war, of how cruel and unjust it was. When I finally decided what to do with my life, it was to follow in that tradition. ~ James Nachtwey

Is there anything more terrible than perpetual motion, than doing and doing and doing, without a reason, without a consciousness, without a change, without an end? ~ T.H. White

Street cred is hard won and Destiny requires you to pay it forward. God helps you through hard times so you can help someone else. ~ T.D. Jakes

Then Lady Chiltern argued the matter on views directly opposite to those which she had put forward when discussing the matter with her husband. ~ Anthony Trollope

She watched beneath her lashes as his chair rocked with his weight. MacLean scowled and grabbed the edge of the table. Angus had cut varying lengths from each chair so that some rocked, while others were at a distinct forward slant so that you had to press back to keep from sliding into the floor.
"Is something wrong, Lord MacLean?"
"This chair." He scooted forward and slipped a little. With a scowl, he stood and pushed his chair to one side, selecting another.
"Lord MacLean-"
"Dougal," he said firmly, sitting down in the new chair. This one rocked backward, and he lurched, as if afraid it would topple over completely.
Sophia coughed to cover her amusement. From the dark scowl turned her way, she hadn't succeeded.
"That's it." Dougal shoved back the chair and stood,glancing about the room. "Ah!" He strode forward and picked out a thin book of sermons from a set on a side table. He lifted the back of his chair, placed a book beneath one leg, and sat down. "Much better."
Sophia wished he weren't quite so enterprising. She and Angus ha worked for hours to make every chair a uniquely uncomfortable experience. ~ Karen Hawkins

Water lapped as she sat forward. "Don't play games with me, Roarke."
"Eve, it's my fondest wish to do just that. ~ J.D. Robb

I will torture you for a human eternity, during which time you will beg me for death by an Opus 24/24, or an ax, or a thousand snakebites. I can see the future, Daniel, and I am looking forward to it, every excruciating second of your murder and dismembedment. Isn't that a wonderful English word, dis-member-ment? ~ James Patterson

The woman who undergoes this operation can sense the morphogenetic field at work in her face. She can feel the lines of force as they guide the embryonic cells into the patterns they must form. Why should a woman let her life be determined by tired collagens or by a shortage of zinc which weakens her electromagnetic field, the matrix of life? The goal of life is living. Life is a field of opportunity, guiding the individual forward along paths created by the meshed forces or objective possibilities as they interweave with a person's own potentialities. And this philosophy of life is now bodied forth in the faces of beautiful women. (Motherhood ~ William S. Wilson

Reason and Knowledge have always played a secondary, subordinate, auxiliary role in the life of peoples, and this will always be the case. A people is shaped and driven forward by an entirely different kind of force, one which commands and coerces them and the origin of which is obscure and inexplicable despite the reality of its presence. ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky

Though actually I think that being in one's twenties is in itself to be restricted. At that age one's vigour is great, and one looks ahead, keeps one's eyes fixed on things to come, and of the things found in one's surroundings the most important are always those that hold the most promise. At the same time, and this is the cruelty of it, this forward-looking gaze is constantly confronted with the limitations of one's character, constantly coming up against a sense of stagnation - hence the youthful fear of stagnating intellectually. ~ Karl Ove Knausgaard

In general, those who resort to mass murder on a collective scale always put forward the justification that they acted on behalf of the nation. ~ Taner Akcam

Finally, good sense is the body of poetic genius, fancy its drapery, motion its life, and imagination the soul that is everywhere and in each; and forms all into one graceful and intelligent whole. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Willa said happiness means taking risks. And if you're not a little scared, you're not doing it right."
That made him laugh, "If that's the case, we have nothing to worry about," he said, leaning forward to kiss her. "Let's be terrified together again. ~ Sarah Addison Allen

The creative act is not hanging on, but yielding to a new creative movement. Awe is what moves us forward. ~ Joseph Campbell

All things are made of atoms - little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In ~ Richard Feynman

I am very excited to be here in Wales and look forward to putting on the Cardiff Blues shirt. ~ Jonah Lomu

interest then I look forward to reporting it. ~ Arn Lou

NRTC is pleased with our preliminary agreement and we look forward to working with SES AMERICOM, as it develops the exciting, new IP-PRIME platform, .. NRTC is focused on finding telecommunications solutions that are ideal for rural communities and working with our membership to make those solutions a reality across the country. ~ Bob Phillips

I have always firmly believed that every director should be judged solely by their work, and not by their work based on their gender. Hollywood is supposedly a community of forward-thinking and progressive people, yet this horrific situation for women directors persists. Gender discrimination stigmatizes our entire industry. Change is essential. Gender neutral hiring is essential. ~ Kathryn Bigelow