growth
One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.
The Counterfeiters: A Novel (New York: Random House, 2012), 353.
Coffee breaks, cab rides, green rooms. Real growth often happens outside of where we intend it to, in the interstitial spaces—what Dr. Seuss calls “the waiting place.” Hans Ulrich Obrist once organized a science and art conference with all of the infrastructure of a conference—the parties, chats, lunches, airport arrivals—but with no actual conference. Apparently it was hugely successful and spawned many ongoing collaborations.
“Incomplete Manifesto for Growth” (1998), more here
For the first time in my life I see that I have grown an inch and I believe that I may in ten years be a poet. It is wonderful.
January 15, 1939 letter to Virginia Woolf, in May Sarton: Selected Letters 1916–1954 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 150.
What a discovery I made one day that the more I spent the more I grew, that it was as easy to occupy a large place & do much work as an obscure place & do little…
April–May 1846 entry, Emerson in His Journals, selected and edited by Joel Porte (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 351.