Quotes About Growth

It's a total lie to say there's only one person you're going to be with for the rest of your life. If you're lucky - and if you try really hard - there will always be more than one.

Fear is a habit like any other, and habits kill what is essential in ourselves.

It seems success takes you away from what you know, he said, while failure condemns you to it.

I realised,' she said, 'that she was happy for the first time in her life, and I realised too that she would never have known this happiness had she not gone through the unhappiness that preceded it, in precisely the way that she did.

I have this theory that most artists never leave childhood, that you're endlessly trying to work out what happened. And leaving university and facing this idea that there is something called adult life that I was going to enter and get a job – I just couldn't. So writing became what I did as soon as I stopped studying.

I could never reconcile myself to the fact that just as you've recovered from your own childhood, and finally crawled out of the pit of it and felt the sun on your face for the first time, you have to give up that place in the sun to a baby you're determined won't suffer the way you did, and crawl back down into another pit of self-sacrifice to make sure she doesn't!

Even the social life she'd envied had started to pall on her, the shallowness of it, the same competitive faces in the same rooms, the repetitiveness and lack of growth, the lack of tenderness or intimacy.

Change is also loss

mutual frankness that she could work out who she herself was and what she actually wanted.

I said I wasn't sure: when people freed themselves they usually forced change on everyone else. But it didn't necessarily follow that to stay free was to stay the same. In fact, the first thing people sometimes did with their freedom was to find another version of the thing that had imprisoned them. Not changing, in other words, deprived them of what they'd gone to such trouble to attain.

History goes over the top like a steamroller, she said, crushing everything in its path, whereas childhood kills the roots. And that is the poison, she said, that seeps into the soil.

Suffering had always appeared to me as an opportunity, I said, and I wasn't sure I would ever discover whether this was true and if so why it was, because so far I had failed to understand what it might be an opportunity for.

realised too that she would never have known this happiness had she not gone through the unhappiness that preceded it, in precisely the way that she did.

I realised too that she would never have known this happiness had she not gone through the unhappiness that preceded it, in precisely the way that she did.

Leaving things behind and starting again is a way of coping with difficulties. I learnt very early in my life that I was able to leave a place and still remain myself.

El éxito te aleja de las cosas que conoces, por lo visto, mientras que el fracaso te condena a ellas.

Change is also loss, and in that sense a parent can lose a child every day, until you realise that you'd better stop predicting what they're going to become and concentrate on what is right in front of you.

Parece que o sucesso leva você para longe daquilo que conhece, disse ele, enquanto o fracasso o condena a isso.

Muutoksen ja toiston kaava on niin tiukasti yhteydessä tietynlaiseen harmoniaan elämässä, ja vapauden harjoittaminen on alisteista sille aivan kuin opinkappaleelle. Muutoksia täytyy annostella kohtuudella kuin vahvaa viiniä.

He often caught himself living in the mistaken belief that transformation was the same thing as progress. Things could look very different while remain the same: time could seem to have altered everything, without changing the thing that needed to change.

Change is also loss, and in that sense a parent can lose a child every day, until you realise that you'd better stop predicting what they're going to become and concentrate on what is right in front of you.

Fear is a habit like any other, and habits kill what is essential in ourselves. I was left with a kind of blankness, Jeffers, from those years of being afraid.

built things that had flourished, had together expanded the sum of what they were and what they had; life had responded willingly to them, had treated them abundantly, and this – he now saw – was what had given him the confidence to break it all, break it with what now seemed to him to be an extraordinary casualness, because he thought there would be more. More what? I asked.

The closest most people come to it is in having a child. And nowhere are our mistakes and limitations more plainly written than there!