Quotes About Growth

It is much better for us and our children when we aim to be ourselves rather than try to "do the right thing". Parents who are authentic are better parents than those who try to be theoretical parents. Parents who make mistakes and take responsibility for their mistakes are better parents than those who try to be perfect. Parents who strive for perfection will always make their children feel like failures and children who feel like failures often end up failing.

We often imagine that we'll develop more quickly if conflicts reach a conclusion, but this is rarely the case. Often the quest for resolution

Shadow and wind compete for dominance, but both teach important lessons.

children are not things to be molded, but are people to be unfolded.

Children are not tings to be molded, but are people to be unfolded.

The trick of life," she said, "is that you can't hold the pain for too long. The magic, either.

there's no point in mourning mistakes when you can fix them

Small-town kids are pebbles in a river, pushed around by the flow, forming pockets and piles, reforming when the current picks up and we find ourselves in a whole new cluster.

It's possible, when you've been married for twenty-five or thirty years, when your children have grown up and moved away, to keep coming back across the tail ends of conversations you started in a different decade, and to realize that whole areas of existence have lain dormant all that time, like seeds in an envelope. There's nothing unusual about that.

At fourteen you don't need sickness or death for tragedy.

There is no royal path to good writing; and such paths as do exist do not lead through neat critical gardens, various as they are, but through the jungles of self, the world, and of craft.

A rattlesnake that doesn't bite teaches you nothing.

People who keep journals have life twice.

If you want a baby, have a new one. Don't baby the old one.

First, he says, you have to go out into the world. This is not a simple matter of going outside one's door. No, that is simply going out. That's what one does when one is on the way to the store to buy a loaf of bread, some cheese, and a bottle of wine. When one goes out into the world, one is shedding preconceptions of past paths and ideas of past paths, and trying to move freely through an unsubstantiated and new geography.

And so well did they hide themselves in their love that grass grew over their hearts and all their loud songs became indecipherable ribbons of air.

It is an enduring satisfaction for our species to make little systems and tend to them.

Your life has been made up of chambers, a series of chambers, so the interlocutor said, his hand on my arm — and in each chamber it is difficult to remember exactly what it was like to be in the previous room. You can remember that certain things happened when you were a child. But, what it was like to be there, to be a child, it really is lost to you. Our world is a difficult succession of losses, vaguely remembered, vaguely enshrined.

One wants the struggle. One shouldn't permit it to be removed.

So—a French garden, as far as I can tell, is a garden that gets tended. You know, my aunt, she walks around it slowly and bends down now and then to pull up some shit, or to stick some other stuff in somewhere. That's a French garden. An English garden is something that used to be a French garden but that no one does anything to anymore. So, it looks run-down. Things don't grow in proper lines. This is what they tell me. My

On the political front, of course it's a zero-sum game. If it's all white males holding positions, you bring 10 women in, then it's, 'Women are coming!' Get 10 blacks and it's, 'Blacks are coming!' 'Hispanics are coming!' Zero-sum game. The seatmates might change but the chairs don't move. In the economy, the number of chairs can actually increase.

once people believe racism is their main problem, they become subject to that idea, and it prevents them from progressing.

If a man didn't make mistakes he'd own the world in a month. But if he didn't profit by his mistakes he wouldn't own a blessed thing

Profits always take care of themselves but losses never do.