Quotes About Growth

You think the worst is behind you, but it's never behind you. In fact, saying something is the worst does not leave room for all the bad stuff that can follow it. You say the pain is nine, but you mean ten. You leave room.

When had I stopped disparaging my parents' way of life and had instead begun to covet it?

A pregnancy tore up our lives. It's going to tear up hers. There's no hiding from that. A pregnancy's one of those things that doesn't hide well. It's kind of like trying to ignore an elephant in the living room.

As we grow, we learn to overcome the tendency to run and hide from ourselves and our feelings. When we feel trapped or pressured, it takes great spiritual and emotional strength to be honest.

It's true more often than we realize: each new love is built from the wreckage of the loves that came before. In Kath, Mike saw Lisa; in Art's eyes, she resembled our mother. I can't look at Mike's face without seeing Dad's. Art, to Ma, was the living ghost of Harry Breen. We love those who fit the peculiar voids within us, our hollow wounds. We love to fill the spaces the old loves left behind.

It was a lesson most people learned much earlier; that even friendship could have an undisclosed shelf life. That loyalty and affection, so consuming and powerful, could dissipate like fog.

I wanted only a familiar voice, someone who knew me. Not some earlier, larval version of myself. . .

What is only crudely established during character creation is fleshed out in play.

No aspect of personality can ever be changed through experience points.

Do we really need to be fed more of the Word, or are we simply undernourished from an absence of living the Word? Maybe we love God, but are we loving others? If our faith is about us, then we are not just hungry—our spirits are starving.

We cannot think our way into a new kind of living. We must live our way into a new kind of thinking.

I slept with my mom until I was 16 years old.

There are few things that get evangelical Christians more excited than new converts coming into the fold. It's like chum for sharks.

What is it with boys and fighting? I am amazed any of them get to be grown-ups the way they're always going at it.

It's the cycle of life," I say, remembering Starlily's words. "Things need to move forward, not backward.

It's a very old idea that patience leads to skills, of course - but it seems urgent now that we go further than this and think about patience itself as the skill to be learned.

Her first rebellion was to write. Her second was to learn. And her third was to love. She

I remember when I was 33 or 34, it was devastating because I realized I wasn't a kid anymore. The great thing about 40 was that I really felt like I had life experience and knew what I was doing now.

I feel I want to grow as an actress and be better. I want to progress as a singer and songwriter, and produce movies and everything. So there'll be no time when I feel I've done it all.

When I was young, I was just about hard work. But as I got older, I did experience anxiety, doubt, judgment, and it's so easy to lose yourself for a second.

I was sad. I was heartbroken. I was scared. But it was only through adversity that I found my saving graces. Sometimes they came from unexpected sources—a song, a challenge, or a friend. It was my responsibility to make the most of them, apply them to my life, act on them, and rise to the occasion.

As I began to love myself, I freed myself of anything that is no good for me—food, people, things, situations, and everything that drew me down and away from myself. At first I called this attitude a healthy egoism. Today I know it as love of oneself.

It's the messy parts that make us human, so we should embrace them too —pat ourselves on the back for getting through them rather than being angry for having gotten into them in the first place

Sometimes you have to explore the darkness to get to the light and get back to who you are.