Quotes About Growth

our familiar features rinsed in weird adulthood.

I don't know what happened to me," he said, shaking his head. "I honestly don't." ... "You grew up, Alex.

You can only write regularly if you're willing to write badly. You can't write regularly and well. One should accept bad writing as a way of priming the pump, a warm-up exercise that allows you to write well.

underneath that I'd said something else: we were both a couple of asswipes, and now only I'm an asswipe; why? And underneath that, something else: once an asswipe, always an asswipe.

Reading is the nourishment that lets you do interesting work.

He hungered for a sense of progress, of new things approaching while old familiar ones receded. It seemed far too long since he'd had that sensation.

You call them friends, Hannah," Mom lashes out, confronting me from the doorway with hands on hips. "But your connection to them is situational. Years from now you'll look back and marvel at what you could have seen in most of these people.

Your desultory twenties," my mother calls my lost time, trying to make it sound reasonable and fun, but it started before I was twenty and lasted much longer. I'm praying it's over.

I wanted to send a young Charlotte into the world to live a different life from mine.

You can only write regularly if you're willing to write badly… Accept bad writing as a way of priming the pump, a warm-up exercise that allows you to write well.

Basic exchanges elongate like time-lapse fruits ripening and dropping into outstretched hands.

Structural Dissatisfaction: Returning to circumstances that once pleased you, having experienced a more thrilling or opulent way of life, and finding that you can no longer tolerate them. But

Structural Dissatisfaction: Returning to circumstances that once pleased you, having experienced a more thrilling or opulent way of life, and finding that you can no longer tolerate them.

I don't know what happened to me," he said, shaking his head. "I honestly don't." Bennie glanced at him, a middle-aged man with chaotic silver hair and thoughtful eyes. "You grew up, Alex," he said, "just like the rest of us.

They resumed walking. Alex felt an ache in his eyes and throat. "I don't know what happened to me," he said, shaking his head. "I honestly don't." Bennie glanced at him, a middle-aged man with chaotic silver hair and thoughtful eyes. "You grew up, Alex," he said, "just like the rest of us.

Days in a house with children grind by like glaciers, but the years rush by like wind.

Briefly, I was a journalist in my twenties, although not a very good one. I didn't quite grasp the whole concept of accuracy.

But there were times when I remembered my younger self the way you'd remember a dear friend you'd lost, for reasons you no longer quite understood.

I learned the terrible truth that as we morph from self to self over time, the love that one self has sworn can seem unfathomable to another.

As it turns out, we're all still learning to be men, or women, all still learning to be ourselves. pg 197

You carry the past with you. Even if there's a before, and an after, in your life. It's still the same life. The trick is to build a bridge between that and what comes later.

And at every moment as I lived my life, I countered this awareness with an exasperated companion thought, namely, Don't be an idiot. You're not a girl. Get over it. But I never got over it.

Probably no people embrace change more enthusiastically, at least in theory, than Americans. Who we are at birth is less important to us than who we will become. We are expected—indeed, obligated—not just to be, but to become.

if you're not failing, you're not actually being particularly experimental).