Plateau Quotes

Just when I begin to imagine I have achieved some pinnacle of understanding, reached the summit of the highest climb . . . I scramble the last few feet to the top only to see that I have merely gained a foothold on a narrow plateau and that entire new mountain ranges rise before me, serried ranks of peaks, each one higher than the last. ~ Stephen R. Lawhead

Every leader will hit a series of plateaus in their lives. The key is not to say there, because settling on a plateau can easily lead to an elongated season of comfort. Being comfortable is one of the leader's worst enemies ~ Gary Rohrmayer

There are botany textbooks that contain pages and pages of growth curves, but it is always the lazy-S-shaped ones that confuse my students the most. Why would a plant decrease in mass just when it is nearing its plateau of maximum productivity? I remind them that this shrinking has proved to be a signal of reproduction. As the green plants reach maturity, some of their nutrients are pulled back and repurposed toward flowers and seeds. Production of the new generation comes at a significant cost to the parent, and you can see it in a cornfield, even from a great distance. ~ Hope Jahren

At some point, you will hit a plateau. If you keep doing same things you did to get to that point, make a change. ~ J.R. Rim

Live it up and enjoy your years on this plateau for life is but a journey into the unknown to learn various lessons along the way to shape and mold our minds, hearts and lives. Take nothing for granted. Appriciate all that you have for one day it will not be there anymore. Don't focus on the past for you can't change what has happened in your life thus far. Focus on the future for you are the dictator of your life and only you can decide where you go from here. ~ Kenneth G. Ortiz

I trust you. It's a very strange sensation."
"Yeah, well, I'll try to hold myself back from going skipping across the plateau in joy."
Adolin grinned. "I'd pay to see that."
"Me skipping?"
"You happy," Adolin said, laughing. "You've got a face like a storm! I half think you could frighten off a storm. ~ Brandon Sanderson

Teller stared up at him. "What transforms a man into a monster, Tarkin?"
"Monster? That's a point of view, is it not? I will say this much: This place, this plateau is what made me. ~ James Luceno

One never learns by success. Success is the plateau that one rests upon to take breath and look down from upon the straight and difficult path, but one does not climb upon a plateau. ~ Josephine Preston Peabody

THE NEW

All that appeared true seems to be coming unglued;
All that was established is being questioned anew;
All that was in place is being quickly erased;

We are coming to a crossroad on a collision course and the train is rapidly accelerating;
The winds of the New are howling and anxious to be embraced;
The usual is blinding and needs to be replaced;

So turn it around and rethink your thoughts;
The old ways are going and the cracks are showing;
Reshape the unchangeable and shake the unshakable;
Then face the new light with its brilliance absorbing you;

Now you've left behind what shouldn't have been and attained a new plateau to view the past;
When you arise the old will be left in the wake;
And you will go forward to a better place.

The Complaint, page 34. ~ Tom Breen

Don't worry about me. I'll heal. Come on-"
"Where are we going?" Luce asked.
"The sun's about to rise," Daniel said, taking a small leather satchel from Phil. "And I figure you must be starving."
Luce hadn't realized it, but she was.
"I thought we could steal a moment before anyone else shows up."
There was a sheer, narrow path from the plateau that led to a small ledge down from where they'd landed. They picked their way down the jagged mountain, hand in hand, and when it was too steep for walking, Daniel coasted, always flying very low to the ground, his wings tucked close to his sides.
"Don't want to alarm the hikers," he explained. "Most places on Earth, people aren't willing to let themselves see miracles, angels. If they catch a glimpse of us flying by, they convince themselves their eyes were playing tricks on them. But in a place like this-"
"People can see miracles," Luce finished for him. "They want to."
"Right. And seeing leads to wonder."
"And wonder leads to-"
"Trouble." Daniel laughed a little.
Luce couldn't help grinning, enjoying that at least for a little while, Daniel was her miracle alone. ~ Lauren Kate

Build peaks, and former highlands become flatlands--ordinary topography loses its allure. The attempt to make our lives not a waste, by seeking a few most remarkable incidents, will make the rest of our lives a waste. The concept of experience turns us into dwellers in a plateau village who hold on to a myth of the happier race of people who live on the peaks. We climb up occasionally, but only with preparation, for short expeditions. We can't stay there, and everyone is restless and unsatisfied at home. ~ Mark Greif

I'm always improving and I want to get better and never hit a plateau. I find it an amazing adventure. ~ Nigel Kennedy

In the end, I feel that one has to have a bit of neurosis to go on being an artist. A balanced human seldom produces art. It's that imbalance which impels us. I often think that all I want to do now is to avoid suicide, accidental or otherwise. Other than that, I think living on the edge is what drives my work and me beyond a certain point. The artist lives with anxiety. When you finally reach a plateau of achievement, there comes a new anxiety - the hunger to push on still further. That angst is what makes you go forward. ~ Beverly Pepper

The woman had gone down on her knees and was shuffling slowly across the cruel ground towards the group of crosses: the dead baby rocked on her back. When she reached the tallest cross she unhooked the child and held the face against the wood and afterwards the loins: then she crossed herself, not as ordinary Catholics do, but in a curious and complicated pattern which included the nose and ears. Did she expect a miracle? And if she did, why should it not be granted her? the priest wondered. Faith, one was told, could move mountains, and here was faith--faith in the spittle that healed the blind man and the voice that raised the dead. The evening star was out: it hung low down over the edge of the plateau: it looked as if it was within reach: and a small hot wind stirred. The priest found himself watching the child for some movement. When none came, it was as if God had missed an opportunity. The woman sat down, and taking a lump of sugar from her bundle, began to eat, and the child lay quiet at the foot of the cross. Why, after all, should we expect God to punish the innocent with more life? ~ Graham Greene

In ancient Egypt, PI was the Giza Plateau Constant (GPC) that was defined using the two equinoxes. It originally was a temporal invariant, and not a spatial one. ~ Ibrahim Ibrahim

Most of us plateau when we lose the tension between where we are and where we ought to be. ~ John Gardiner

I got a lesson for life, can't learn more. I am suffering from learning curve plateau effect. ~ Nighat Hafiz

Time has scratched its mark all over the Giza Plateau! ~ Ibrahim Ibrahim

'Breaking Bad' was such a high plateau. ~ Aaron Paul

We are tempted to believe that certain achievements and possessions will give us enduring satisfaction. We are invited to imagine ourselves scaling the steep cliff face of happiness in order to reach a wide, high plateau on which we will live out the rest of our lives; we are not reminded that soon after gaining the summit, we will be called down again into fresh lowlands of anxiety and desire. ~ Alain De Botton

The 'OK Plateau' is that place we all get to where we just stop getting better at something. Take typing, for example. You might type and type and type all day long, but once you reach a certain level, you just don't get appreciably faster. That's because it's become automatic. You've moved it to the back of your mind's filing cabinet. ~ Joshua Foer

You did something noble. This will cause a release of energy. It causes a vibratory shift. It means you are moving into a different plateau of consciousness. ~ Frederick Lenz

But on the voluptuous stone of the Colorado Plateau nothing is ever as it appears. There is constant potential. The desert is not dried up and empty as if it might blow away like the seeds of brittle grass. It is the bones of the earth brought to daylight, half stuck out of the ground so that winds and flash floods constantly reveal more. Just as it is beneath our flesh, the bones are the sturdiest, most lasting parts. With their hollowed sockets and deliberate lines, they set a foundation upon which the flesh of forests, mountains, and oceans might accumulate. Only here, the flesh is gone, the last of it turned to dune sand. ~ Craig Childs

We stand on no high moral plateau in our time. We are, in fact, plumbing depths of depravity unknown to our ancestors
and whatever may have been the evil in which they engaged, at least they were willing to acknowledge the principle by which their evil was condemned. We have even turned our back on the principle. ~ Alan Keyes

Occasionally there came gusts of winds, breezes from the sea rolling in one sweep over the whole plateau of the Caux country, which brought even to these fields a salt freshness. The rushes, close to the ground, whistled; the branches trembled in a swift rustling, while their summits, ceaselessly swaying, kept up a deep murmur. ~ Gustave Flaubert

Achievers move forward at all times. Achievement is not a plateau, it's a beginning. ~ Ziad K. Abdelnour

There is a curious idea among unscientific men that in scientific writing there is a common plateau of perfectionism. Nothing could be more untrue. The reports of biologists are the measure, not of the science, but of the men themselves. There are as few scientific giants as any other kind. In some reports it is impossible, because of inept expression, to relate the descriptions to the living animals. In some papers collecting places are so mixed or ignored that the animals mentioned cannot be found at all. The same conditioning forces itself into specification as it does into any other kind of observation, and the same faults of carelessness will be found in scientific reports as in the witness chair of a criminal court. It has seemed sometimes that the little men in scientific work assumed the awe-fullness of a priesthood to hide their deficiencies, as the witch-doctor does with his stilts and high masks, as the priesthoods of all cults have, with secret or unfamiliar languages and symbols. It is usually found that only the little stuffy men object to what is called "popularization", by which they mean writing with a clarity understandable to one not familiar with the tricks and codes of the cult. We have not known a single great scientist who could not discourse freely and interestingly with a child. Can it be that the haters of clarity have nothing to say, have observed nothing, have no clear picture of even their own fields? A dull man seems to be a dull man no matter wh ~ John Steinbeck

All states of mind have different views. On the higher plateau, opportunities will open to you because you can see them. ~ Frederick Lenz

If a man seeks you to understand him; listen closely, for what is really going on is nothing more that you manifesting your desire to seek yourself on a plateau of awareness that is not tangible ~ Jeremy Aldana

The dream begins, most of the time,with a teacher who believes in you, who tugs and pushes and leads you on to the next plateau sometimes poking you with a sharp stick called truth ~ Dan Rather

Almost everyone who reaches a plateau where he or she is happy and comfortable says it's because of finding balance between work, relaxation, exercise, socialising and family - plus some alone time to do something contemplative, creative, or educational. ~ Neil Strauss

I don't think I have reached a plateau. I have just reached the level where I am today. But I need to go above it. ~ David Beckham

What had her life been like in Venda? Or maybe, more precisely, what had they done to her? She was not the result of happy, content parents. It was like she'd been held prisoner in a cellar her whole life. She flinched at sun and an open sky. As soon as we hit the Heethe plateau, she kept her eyes straight ahead on some distant point, her focus like steel, her shoulders rigid, like she carried a heavy pack on her back. ~ Mary E. Pearson

The Himalayan Glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau have been among the most affected by global warming. The Himalayas ... provide more than half of the drinking water for 40% of the world's population ... Within the next half-century, that 40% of the world's people may well face a very serious drinking water shortage, unless the world acts boldly and quickly to mitigate global warming. ~ Al Gore

Psychologists have discovered that the most efficient method is to force yourself to type 10 to 20 percent faster than your comfort pace and to allow yourself to make mistakes. Only by watching yourself mistype at that faster speed can you figure out the obstacles that are slowing you down and overcome them. By bringing typing out of the autonomous stage and back under conscious control, it is possible to conquer the OK plateau. ~ Joshua Foer

I had come to appreciate the long open stretches of two-lane highway across the sagey sea and mountain-studded plateau of the Great Basin, but the towns and cities were another thing. I liked the natural face of Nevada, but was not as impressed by the human face. ~ Neil Peart

It was a debacle which swept the Columbia Plateau. ~ J Harlen Bretz

I mean, in the last few months alone, I've been pinned in a big set of white-water rapids, been bitten by an angry snake in a jungle, had a close escapewith a big mountain rockfall, narrowly avoided being eaten by a huge croc in the Australian swamps, and had to cut away from my main parachute and come down on my reserve, some five thousand feet above the Arctic plateau.
When did all this craziness become my world?
It's as if - almost accidentally - this madness had become my life. And don't get me wrong - I love it all.
The game, though, now, is to hang on to that life.
Every day is the most wonderful of blessings, and a gift that I never, ever take for granted.
Oh, and as for the scars, broken bones, aching limbs and sore back?
I consider them just gentle reminders that life is precious - and that maybe, just maybe, I am more fragile than I dare to admit. ~ Bear Grylls

Going through the pass, which demands a sort of swastika maneuvering in order to debouch free and clear on the high plateau, I had the impression of wading through phantom seas of blood; the earth was not parched and convulsed in the usual Greek way but bleached and twisted as must have been the mangled, death-stilled limbs of the slain who were left to rot and give their blood here in the merciless sun to the roots of the wild olives which cling to the steep mountain slope with vulturous claws. ~ Henry Miller

I felt in London the way you do when you take one step too many at the bottom of a flight of stairs: brought up short by the unexpected plateau and its dull, unyielding thud. ~ Lisa Halliday

We stopped when we reached a plateau near the peak of the mountain and perhaps it was delirium, but I think I saw God for the first time. ~ Jamie Hoang

Plateau experiencing can be achieved, learned, earned by long hard work ... A transient glimpse is certainly possible in the peak experiences which may, after all, come sometimes to anyone. But, so to speak, to take up residence on the high plateau ... that is another matter altogether. That tends to be a lifelong effort. ~ Abraham Maslow

There are other noteworthy characteristics of this rock art style: Anthropomorphs without headdresses instead sport horns, or antennae, or a series of concentric circles. Also prominent in many of the figures' hands are scepters--each one an expression of something significant in the natural world. Some look like lightning bolts, some like snakes; other burst from the fingers like stalks of ricegrass. Colorado Plateau rock-art expert Polly Schaafsma has interpreted these figures as otherworldly--drawn by shamans in isolated and special locations, seemingly as part of a ceremonial retreat. Schaafsma and others believe that the style reflects a spirituality common to all hunter-gatherer societies across the globe--a way of life that appreciates the natural world and employs the use of visions to gain understanding and appreciation of the human relationship to the earth. Typically, Schaafsma says, it is a spirituality that identifies strongly with animals and other aspects of nature--and one that does so with an interdependent rather than dominant perspective. To underscore the importance of art in such a culture, Schaafsma points to Aboriginal Australians, noting how, in a so-called primitive society, where forms of written and oral communication are considered (at least by our standards) to be limited, making art is "one means of defining the mystic tenets of one's faith. ~ Amy Irvine

Women, at 50, are on a plateau with their careers, but later they ascend. ~ Tracey Emin

In referring to her earlier statement that he had was not her type because he was "a dollar short when it came to maturity and a day late when it came to peace."
I may have been wrong about that," she conceded. "You are a complicated man, but happily complicated. You have found a way to be at home with the world's confusion, a way to embrace the chaos rather than struggle to reduce it or become its victim. It's all part of the game to you, and you are delighted to play. In that regard, you may have reached a more elevated plateau of harmony than ... ummph. ~ Tom Robbins

The Sinic [Chinese] Civilization originated in the Yellow River Valley. The nature of the challenge which started it is unknown but it is clear that the conditions were severe rather than easy.

The Mayan Civilization originated from the challenge of a tropical fores; the Andean from that of a bleak plateau....

The Indic Civilization in Ceylon flourished in the rainless half of the island.....
New England, whose European colonists have played a predominant part in the history of North America, is one of the bleakest and most barren parts of the continent....

The natives of Nyasaland, where life is easy, remained primitive savages down to the advent of invaders from a distant and inclement Europe. ~ Arnold Joseph Toynbee

If you find yourself struggling to build a good habit or break a bad one, it is not because you have lost your ability to improve. It is often because you have not yet crossed what James calls, "Plateau of Latent Potential." When you finally break through the Plateau of Latent Potential, people will call it an overnight success. ~ James Clear

Home sales are coming down from the mountain peak, but they will level out at a high plateau - a plateau that is higher than previous peaks in the housing cycle. ~ David Lereah

That is, we're into a whole new world with the Internet, and whenever we sort of cross another plateau in our development, there are those who seek to take advantage of it. So this is a replay of things that have happened throughout our history. ~ William J. Clinton

[In Adelie Land, Antarctica, a howling river of] wind, 50 miles wide, blows off the plateau, month in and month out, at an average velocity of 50 m.p.h. As a source of power this compares favorably with 6,000 tons of water falling every second over Niagara Falls. I will not further anticipate some H. G. Wells of the future who will ring the antarctic with power-producing windmills; but the winds of the Antarctic have to be felt to be believed, and nothing is quite impossible to physicists and engineers. ~ Frank Debenham

The Everlasting Staircase"
Jeffrey McDaniel

When the call came, saying twenty-four hours to live,
my first thought was: can't she postpone her exit

from this planet for a week? I've got places to do,
people to be. Then grief hit between the ribs,

said disappear or reappear more fully. so I boarded
a red eyeball and shot across America,

hoping the nurses had enough quarters to keep
the jukebox of Grandma's heart playing. She grew up

poor in Appalachia. And while world war II
functioned like Prozac for the Great Depression,

she believed poverty was a double feature,
that the comfort of her adult years was merely

an intermission, that hunger would hobble back,
hurl its prosthetic leg through her window,

so she clipped, clipped, clipped -- became the Jacques
Cousteau of the bargain bin, her wetsuit

stuffed with coupons. And now --pupils fixed, chin
dangling like the boots of a hanged man --

I press my ear to her lampshade-thin chest
and listen to that little soldier march toward whatever

plateau, or simply exhaust his arsenal of beats.
I hate when people ask if she even knew I was there.

The point is I knew, holding the one-sided
conversation of her hand. Once I believed the heart

was like a bar of soap -- the more you use it,
the smaller it gets; care too much and it'll ~ Jeffrey McDaniel

When you find yourself on a plateau, look for another level. ~ Nido R. Qubein

Don't let yourself stagnate or reach a plateau. Keep learning, keep improving. Be open to change. Your ability to constantly raise the bar higher and set standards will help you evolve and take you to the next level. ~ Roopleen

The truth is that the history of Mexico is a history in the image of its geography: abrupt and tortuous. Each historical period is like a plateau surrounded by tall mountains and separated from the other plateaus by precipices and divides. ~ Octavio Paz

Would he choose to stand with her on the plateau or push her down the hill? ~ Lisa Genova

But in the end, mastery involves working and working and showing little improvement, perhaps with a few moments of flow pulling you along, then making a little progress, and then working and working on that new, slightly higher plateau again. It's grueling, to be sure. But that's not the problem; that's the solution. ~ Daniel H. Pink

The Yoga of the Dream State has always held to be one of the fastest, most efficient ways of reaching a plateau experience of subtle and causal realms, thus quickly opening the door to stable adaptation at - and transcendence of - those realms. ~ Ken Wilber

I've never been the type of artist to plateau or have a big peak in my career and then a big decline. ~ SonReal

About six in the evening I came out of the moorland to a white ribbon of road which wound up the narrow vale of a lowland stream. As I followed it, fields gave place to bent, the glen became a plateau, and presently I had reached a kind of pass where a solitary house smoked in the twilight. The road swung over a bridge, and leaning on the parapet was a young man. He was smoking a long clay pipe and studying the water with spectacled eyes. In his left hand was a small book with a finger marking the place. Slowly he repeated - As when a Gryphon through the wilderness With winged step, o'er hill and moory dale Pursues the Arimaspian. He jumped round as my step rung on the keystone, and I saw a pleasant sunburnt boyish face. 'Good evening to you,' he said gravely. 'It's a fine night for the road.' The smell of peat smoke and of some savoury roast floated to me from the house. ~ John Buchan

I've been thinking about the record since I reached the fifty plateau. But you think about it and then you let it go because you can't waste many brain cells on hours thinking about it. ~ Mark McGwire

This book is written for those who want more Jesus. It is for those who are bored with what American Christianity offers. It is for those who don't want to plateau, those who would rather die before their convictions do. ~ Francis Chan

But we must accept one central truth and responsibility as participants in a democracy: Freedom is not a state; it is an act. It is not some enchanted garden perched high on a distant plateau where we can finally sit down and rest. Freedom is the continuous action we all must take, and each generation must do its part to create an even more fair, more just society. ~ John Lewis

The pyramidal design parameter (i.e., 33 PI) on the Giza Plateau transcends from the terrestrial plane into that of the celestial by the exponential process of raising it to the power of four. As magnified above, so diminished exponentially by four below. And yet, reducing it exponentially furthermore by four, makes it recede into trigonometry and geometry. ~ Ibrahim Ibrahim

In The Great Stagnation, Cowen bemoaned the lack of big technological advances and argued that the American economy has slowed and wages have been depressed as a result. "In a figurative sense, the American economy has enjoyed lots of low-hanging fruit since at least the seventeenth century, whether it be free land, lots of immigrant labor, or powerful new technologies," he wrote. "Yet during the last forty years, that low-hanging fruit started disappearing, and we started pretending it was still there. We have failed to recognize that we are at a technological plateau and the trees are more bare than we would like to think. That's it. That is what has gone wrong." In ~ Ashlee Vance

We have way too many lawyers, the price for them has plummeted and you will have a miserable and unsatisfying life. Unless you get into Harvard Law. You could be in a yurt on the Mongolian Plateau and they'll say, "Oh you must be smart. You went to Harvard Law." ~ Ann Coulter

In comparison, Mount Everest, though 29,029 feet above sea level, rests on the 17,000-foot-high Tibetan plateau and rises just 12,000 feet from base to summit. A similar plateau boosts the Andes; without those geological booster seats, those peaks all would lie in Denali's shadow. ~ Andy Hall

I reassessed the map and my timing. I had to come up with a plan to get myself out of this mess, and fast.
I turned 90 degrees and started to climb back up onto the high ground that I had just come off. This was way off-route, I should be heading down, but I just knew that the high ground would be better than fighting a losing battle in the bog. I had done that before--and lost.
The wind was blowing hard now, down from the plateau, as if trying to deter me. I put my head down, ignored the shoulder straps that pulled and heaved against my lower neck muscles, and went for it. I had to take control.
I was refusing to fail Selection again in this godforsaken armpit of a place.
Once on the ridge, I started to run. And running anywhere in that moon grass, with the weight of a small person on your back, was a task. But I was on fire. I kept running. And I kept clawing back the time and miles.
I ran all the way into the last checkpoint and then collapsed. The DS looked at me strangely and chuckled to himself.
"Good effort," he commented, having watched me cover the last mile or so of rough ground. I had made it within time.
Demons dead. Adrenaline firing. ~ Bear Grylls

The plateau of Mexico is 8,000 feet high, and that of Puebla 9,000 feet. ~ Edward Burnett Tylor

Becoming drunk is a journey that generally elates him in the early stages - he's good company, expansive, mischievous and fun, the famous old poet, almost as happy listening as talking. But once the destination is met, once established up there on that unsunny plateau, a fully qualified drunk, the nastier muses, the goblins of aggression, paranoia, self-pity take control. The expectation now is that an evening with John will go bad somehow, unless everyone around is prepared to toil at humouring and flattering and hours of frozen-faced listening. No one will be. ~ Ian McEwan

Harriet turned round, and we both saw a girl walking towards us. She was dark-skinned and thin, not veiled but dressed in a sitara, a brightly coloured robe of greens and pinks, and she wore a headscarf of a deep rose colour. In that barren place the vividness of her dress was all the more striking. On her head she balanced a pitcher and in her hand she carried something. As we watched her approach, I saw that she had come from a small house, not much more than a cave, which had been built into the side of the mountain wall that formed the far boundary of the gravel plateau we were standing on. I now saw that the side of the mountain had been terraced in places and that there were a few rows of crops growing on the terraces. Small black and brown goats stepped up and down amongst the rocks with acrobatic grace, chewing the tops of the thorn bushes.
As the girl approached she gave a shy smile and said, 'Salaam alaikum, ' and we replied, 'Wa alaikum as salaam, ' as the sheikh had taught us. She took the pitcher from where it was balanced on her head, kneeled on the ground, and gestured to us to sit. She poured water from the pitcher into two small tin cups, and handed them to us. Then she reached into her robe and drew out a flat package of greaseproof paper from which she withdrew a thin, round piece of bread, almost like a large flat biscuit. She broke off two pieces, and handed one to each of us, and gestured to us to eat and drink. The water and the bread were both del ~ Paul Torday

I don't know when Tiger Lily stopped growing older; I can't pinpoint that moment. But I do know I never saw her visibly age beyond the days when she was with Peter. I like to think her growing stopped the day they were on the plateau, watching the horses. ~ Jodi Lynn Anderson

In a consumer society, expectations dare not plateau, because a growing economy depends on rising expectations ... The more we let our level of contentment be determined by outside factors-a new car, fashionable clothes, a prestigious career, social status-the more we relinquish control over our own happiness. ~ Paul Brand

I think the Colorado Plateau is the most scenic area in the world - let's begin with that. Not just the United States. ~ Stewart Udall

I find myself now preaching about the golden age of manned spaceflight, because something went on there, within us, that we're missing. When we went to the Moon, it was not only just standing on a new plateau for all mankind. We changed the way everybody in the world thought of themselves, you know. It was a change that went on inside of us. And we're losing that. ~ Walter Cunningham

Plateaus are a manifestation of the law of diminishing returns, and when we reach one it simply means that it is time to adjust our methods. ~ Chris Matakas

As a task becomes automated, the parts of the brain involved in conscious reasoning become less active and other parts of the brain take over. You could call it the "OK plateau," the point at which you decide you're OK with how good you are at something, turn on autopilot, and stop improving. ~ Joshua Foer

Get comfortable being uncomfortable, that's how you break the plateau and reach the next level. ~ Chalene Johnson

The way the Rider flourished his sword afterward- spinning it in a quick circle by his side- suddenly seemed familiar to Eragon, as did all his preceding swordsmanship. He stared with growing horror at his enemy's hand-and-a-half sword, then back up at the eye slits of his mirrored helm, and shouted, I know you!
He threw himself at the Rider, trapping both swords between their bodies, hooked his fingers underneath the helm, and ripped it off. And there in the center of the plateau, on the edge of the Burning Plains of Allagaesia, stood Murtagh. ~ Christopher Paolini

The town of North Falls consisted of twenty-eight square miles positioned on a high plateau in the southern region of the Green Mountain range. It had the highest altitude of any village in the state, which meant the snow came early and it came often. It also meant that the first thing anybody noticed about the town was the church steeple. The rotting whitewashed wood and the slatted oval window and the copper spire all connected to the simple wood framing. It was the highest point in the state, and people liked to say that it was closer to God than anywhere else in Vermont. Not that it did the town much good. ~ Ian Pisarcik

When I'm standing in the middle of the salt flats, where you swear that the pupils of your eyes have turned white because of the searing heat that is rising from the desert, I think of my childhood, I think of my mother, my father, my grandparents; I think of the history that we hold there and it is beautiful to me. But it is both a blessing and a burden to be rooted in place. It's recognizing the pattern of things, almost feeling a place before you even see it. In Southern Utah, on the Colorado plateau where canyon walls rise upward like praying hands, that is a holy place to me. ~ Terry Tempest Williams

Everyone is really afraid of getting out there and not being good. That's the challenge: To be afraid and know people are staring at you and know you might not do all that well, but you do it anyway. What singles out the successful athlete from the ones who never make it past a plateau, it that successful athletes risk failure, even though they are terrified. ~ Aimee Mullins

The Himalayas are the crowning achievement of the Indo-Australian plate. India in the Oligocene crashed head on into Tibet, hit so hard that it not only folded and buckled the plate boundaries but also plowed into the newly created Tibetan plateau and drove the Himalayas five and a half miles into the sky. The mountains are in some trouble. India has not stopped pushing them, and they are still going up. Their height and volume are already so great they are beginning to melt in their own self-generated radioactive heat. When the climbers in 1953 planted their flags on the highest mountain, they set them in snow over the skeletons of creatures that had lived in a warm clear ocean that India, moving north, blanked out. Possibly as much as 20,000 feet below the sea floor, the skeletal remains had turned into rock. This one fact is a treatise in itself on the movements of the surface of the earth.

If by some fiat, I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence; this is the one I would choose: the summit of Mount Everest is marine limestone. ~ John McPhee

Settling into a new country is like getting used to a new pair of shoes. At first they pinch a little, but you like the way they look, so you carry on. The longer you have them, the more comfortable they become. Until one day without realizing it you reach a glorious plateau. Wearing those shoes is like wearing no shoes at all. The more scuffed they get, the more you love them and the more you can't imagine life without them. ~ Tahir Shah

It takes some skill to navigate this disorder. It takes some grit to control it so it doesn't control me. Sometimes it takes a guide. For me it takes a destination. Lucy is my destination. Whether I'm cowered in a dark corner or perched on a blindingly bright plateau, my aim is always to get back to her. ~ Ka Hancock

Our population is headed for a stable plateau, which means an aging population. ~ Emanuel Celler

As a child I experienced loss for what I felt was withheld from me: the delicious milk, the mountains of flowers I could not roll in, the cousins I could not play with, a beautiful house on a plateau. As the years grew with me, I became aware of absences that impacted me directly and indirectly: the loss of place, of stories, of family and of citizenship. ~ Tsering Wangmo Dhompa

Because for Amy, love was like drugs or booze or porn: There was no plateau. Each exposure needed to be more intense than the last to achieve the same result. ~ Gillian Flynn

He found himself in habiting the vast, empty plateau where most people live, between boredom and contentment. ~ Jess Walter

In mathematics, there's a name for this short-term greed, the process of always choosing the option that gives you instant gratification. It's called the "greedy algorithm," and following it almost always leads to a plateau. ~ Bob Sullivan

Never let a red line become the cage from which there is no escape. Constricting yourself in statements without any actions coming forth in the future in not engaging in compromise or negotiation will hang you on a tightrope by your own tongue. More talk, less squawk may just be the key to grace in unlocking a sense of mutual respect. Thumping a chest and making a threat from many a mile away from a situation is good for an ability to show off how well one can speak in broad tones. Yet, to sit down across from someone and speak to them as an equal, would go a lot further in balancing the plateau of respect shown. Maybe the red line will fly away and the need to always cling to it shall diminish with ears that truly listen to one another - A.H. Scott 3/3/14 ~ A.H. Scott

At her easiest, she was hard, because her brain was always working, working, working - I had to exert myself just to keep pace with her. I'd spend an hour crafting a casual e-mail to her, I became a student of arcana so I could keep her interested: the Lake poets, the code duello, the French Revolution. Her mind was both wide and deep, and I got smarter being with her. And more considerate, and more active, and more alive, and almost electric, because for Amy, love was like drugs or booze or porn: There was no plateau. Each exposure needed to be more intense than the last to achieve the same result.
Amy made me believe I was exceptional, that I was up to her level of play. That was both our making and undoing. Because I couldn't handle the demands of greatness. I began craving ease and averageness, and I hated myself for it, and ultimately, I realized, I punished her for it. I turned her into the brittle, prickly thing she became. ~ Gillian Flynn

Gonpo Tso was born a princess. As a young woman, she dressed in fur-trimmed robes with fat ropes of coral beads strung around her neck. She lived in an adobe castle on the edge of the Tibetan plateau with a reception room large enough to accommodate the thousand Buddhist monks who once paid tribute to her father. ~ Barbara Demick

It is my dream that the entire Tibetan plateau should become a free refuge where humanity and nature can live in peace and in harmonious balance. It would be a place where people from all over the world could come to seek the true meaning of peace within themselves, away from the tensions and pressures of much of the rest of the world ~ Dalai Lama

There is no plateau in the Christian life. We are either growing closer to Christ's likeness or we are falling away. ~ Aimee Byrd

Summer on the high plateau can be delectable as honey; it can also be a roaring scourge. To those who love the place, both are good, since both are part of its essential nature. And it is to know its essential nature that I am seeking here. To know, that is, with the knowledge that is a process of living. This is not done easily nor in an hour. It is a tale too slow for the impatience of our age, not of immediate enough import for its desperate problems. Yet it has its own rare value. It is, for one thing, a corrective of glib assessment: one never quite knows the mountain, nor oneself in relation to it. However often I walk on them, these hills hold astonishment for me. There is no getting accustomed to them. ~ Nan Shepherd

We are writing this book as a rhizome. It is composed of plateaus. We have given it a circular form, but only for laughs. Each morning we would wake up, and each of us would ask himself what plateau he was going to tackle, writing five lines here, ten there. We had hallucinatory experiences, we watched lines leave one plateau and proceed to another like columns of tiny ants. ~ Gilles Deleuze

To value the tradition of, and the discipline required for, the craft of fiction seems today pointless. The real Arcadia is a lonely, mountainous plateau, overbouldered and strewn with the skulls of sheep slain for vellum and old bitten pinions that tried to be quills. It's forty rough miles by mule from Athens, a city where there's a fair, a movie house, cotton candy. ~ Alexander Theroux

Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau. ~ Irving Fisher

Because left to its own devices life would never produce love, it would only lead you to attraction, from attraction to pleasure, then to attachment, to satisfaction, which finally leads to wearisomeness and boredom. Then comes a plateau. Then once again the weary cycle: attraction, pleasure, attachment, fulfillment, satisfaction, boredom. All of this mixed with the anxieties, the jealousies, the possessiveness, the sorrow, the pain, that make the cycle a roller coaster. When you have gone repeatedly around and around the cycle, a time finally comes when you have had enough and want to call a halt to the whole process. And if you are lucky enough not to run into something or someone else that catches your eye, you will have at least attained a fragile peace. That is the most that life can give you; and you can mistakenly equate this state with freedom and you die without ever having known what it means to be really free and to love. ~ Anthony De Mello

The uncle ignored Gracie's father. 'In any event,' he went on, 'when brewers combine hops with yeast and grain and water, and allow the mixture to ferment -- to rot -- it magically produces an elixir so gassy with blue-collar cheer, so regal with glints of gold, so titillating with potential mischief, so triumphantly refreshing, that it seizes the soul and thrusts it toward that ethereal plateau where, to paraphrase Baudelaire, all human whimsies float and merge. ~ Tom Robbins