Time & Perspective Quote by J. G. Holland

A novelist’s version of a speed limit: slow down, sequence your ambitions, and stop mistaking velocity for progress. Holland’s line works because it frames patience not as meekness but as strategy. “One thing at a time” is the familiar self-help mantra, but the second clause sharpens it into a philosophy of time: “all things in succession.” You don’t renounce scale; you reorder it. The promise isn’t a smaller life, it’s a life built to hold its own weight.

The real bite is in the horticultural metaphor. “That which grows fast withers as rapidly” turns quick wins into a kind of botanical scam: lush on the surface, structurally flimsy underneath. Holland is quietly warning against the seduction of shortcuts, whether in character, craft, money, or public reputation. The slow-growing plant “endures” not because it’s prettier, but because it has roots. Endurance is presented as an engineering fact, not a moral prize.

Context matters here. Holland is writing in a 19th-century America intoxicated by expansion, industry, and the myth of the self-made climb. His sentence reads like a corrective to a culture that’s already learning what boom-and-bust feels like, economically and spiritually. For a novelist, “succession” also signals narrative sense: lives, like stories, become coherent when events earn each other. The subtext is almost stern: if you want something that lasts, build it slowly enough that it can survive you.