future
It amazes me that most people spend more time planning next summer’s vacation than they do planning the rest of their lives.
Get What You Want! (Executive Books, 1998).
If you want to make the right decision for the future, fear is not a very good consultant.
“Publish or Perish,” by Ken Auletta, in The New Yorker, April 26, 2010.
Who knows what the day after tomorrow will bring—the very thing we most wanted and haven’t allowed our hearts to hope.
Letter to Eudora Welty, January 24, 1967, in What There Is to Say We Have Said, ed. by Suzanne Marrs (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2011), 213.
Be of good hope. Try to think in terms of “the long run” and store up your honey like the bees.
July 18, 1954 letter to Madeleine L’Engle, in May Sarton: Selected Letters 1916–1954, ed. by Susan Sherman (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 349.
When I was a child, people used to talk about what would happen by the year 02000. For the next thirty years they kept talking about what would happen by the year 02000, and now no one mentions a future date at all. The future has been shrinking by one year per year for my entire life. I think it is time for us to start a long-term project that gets people thinking past the mental barrier of an ever-shortening future. I would like to propose a large (think Stonehenge) mechanical clock, powered by seasonal temperature changes. It ticks once a year, bongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes out every millennium.
Quoted on the Long Now Foundation’s website, a cultural institution focused on promoting “slower/better” thinking and providing a counterpoint to our current “faster/cheaper” mind-set.
For last year’s words belong to last year’s language / And next year’s words await another voice.
“Little Gidding,” in The Waste Land and Other Poems (New York: Penguin, 2003), xxi.
America is now on the unlit, unpaved road to nowhere.
“America Goes Dark,” The New York Times, August 8, 2010.
In the age of Google, when everything you say is forever searchable, the future belongs to those who leave no footprints.
“Can We Talk?,” The New York Times, July 16, 2010.