Linear Progression Quotes

The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once.

Our intuition about the future is linear. But the reality of information technology is exponential, and that makes a profound difference. If I take 30 steps linearly, I get to 30. If I take 30 steps exponentially, I get to a billion.

You can't get from A to Z by passing up B.

We say that time passes, time goes by, and time flows. Those are metaphors. We also think of time as a medium in which we exist.

There is no other way of writing a novel than to begin at the beginning at to continue to the end.

Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end; then stop.

Philosophy still moves too much straight ahead, and is not yet cyclical enough.

To me, we're living in a non-linear world... But the truth is we are linear creatures. Everything unfolds one after the next. And that's the thing we've become disconnected from.

Well, we think that time "passes," flows past us, but what if it is we who move forward, from past to future, always discovering the new? It would be a little like reading a book, you see. The book is all there, all at once, between its covers. But if you want to read the story and understand it, you must begin with the first page, and go forward, always in order. So the universe would be a very great book, and we would be very small readers.

The present was an egg laid by the past that had the future inside its shell.

Every moment is all the things that have happened before and all the things that are going to happen, and...the way all those things look at one point on their way along a line.

When you write a novel or paint a picture, you have the opportunity to approach it and back off, tear up pages, write, rewrite, paint over, and come back to it. In film, once you start shooting, you can't restart the clock, and you keep moving forward, and you don't look back, and you don't go back. And that is, of course, antithetical to the creative process. It's really hard to generate a comfortable creative flow under that kind of pressure.

I start at the beginning, go on to the end, then stop.

The secret is writing down one simple line after another.

The straight line leads to the downfall of humanity.

And now the sequence of events in no particular order.

There is one thing pleasantly unconfusing about medicine. The direction and the end are fixed and the patient never works backward.

I don't think you can talk about progress in art - movement, but not progress. You can speak of a point on a line for the purpose of locating things, but it's a horizontal line, not a vertical one.

The so called "progress," "time marching on," is not a straight line, but a pendulum.

My books are written with a strong chronological spine.

Nothing is more linear than a street; nothing has a more fixed beginning, middle, and end.

I am strongly of the opinion that chronology is very important. The great arc of time is what children are wired for.

Our culture is teleological-it presumes purposive development and a conclusion.

Organic growth is a cyclical process; it is just as true to say that the oak is a potential acorn as it is to say the acorn is a potential oak. But the process of writing a poem, of making any art object, is not cyclical but a motion in one direction toward a definite end.

The now, the here, through which all future plunges into the past.