Some sentences you read once and carry for years. This one has been in my commonplace book since the first page:
The years teach much which the days never know.
It comes from Emerson’s essay Experience, which he wrote after the death of his young son, and it is easy to read as a consolation. Things will make sense in time. But I have come to read it as a description of how anything worthwhile gets made.
No single day of writing feels like progress. Most days you move a paragraph around and go to bed unsure whether it is better. It is only from the distance of a year that you can see the shape of what the days were building, and by then you have usually forgotten the days themselves.