Ishmael Reed Quotes

Change is incremental. Change is small.

It takes time for an acorn to turn into an oak, but the oak is already implied in the acorn.

Everything comes gradually and at its appointed hour.

Nature herself has never attempted to effect great changes rapidly.

Consumer behaviour changes in a glacial fashion.

Great issues develop from small beginnings.

Today life opened inside me like an egg.

There is no place so AWAKE and ALIVE as the edge of becoming.

She thought she would know when it happened. But now, as she looked around, she wondered if it was really like that at all. Maybe it happened in a million different ways, when you were thinking of it and you weren't. Maybe there was no gap, no jump, no chasm. You didn't forget yourself all at once. Maybe you just looked around one time or another and you thought, Hey. And there you were.

I realized that even big waves start with small ripples

No great thing happens suddenly.

Beginning with doom in the bulb, the spring unravels.

Men are impatient, and for precipitating things; but the Author of Nature appears deliberate throughout His operations, accomplishing His natural ends by slow, successive steps. And there is a plan of things beforehand laid out, which, from the nature of it, requires various systems of means, as well as length of time, in order to the carrying on its several parts into execution.

A world to be born under your footsteps.

One of the great breakthroughs of evolution theory is that you start with simple things and they will grow into complexity.

Life is always moving, changing, shifting into its next shape. The movement is natural. It is how we evolve. Let the shifts happen. Take responsibility for yourself each step of the way. Trust the new shape and form of your world

All the great and beneficent operations of Nature are produced by slow and often imperceptible degrees. The work of destruction and devastation only is violent and rapid.

The processes of growth are gradual, bearing fruit in a decade, not a day.

she was just that shiver that makes you walk faster at night. You don't know why you do it, but some part of you remembers that the dark is never really empty. ~Anita

I had the feeling that some horrible image was just beyond the field of vision, moving, as I turned my head, so that I never quite saw it.

I think each thing in a way acts as a stepping - stone for whatever the next thing is.

The tree which fills the arms grew from the tiniest sprout.