Quotes About Growth

God, youth is a terrible time! So much feeling and so little notion of how to handle it!

An infant is a seed. Is it an oak seed or a cabbage seed? Who knows. All mothers think their children are oaks, but the world never lacks for cabbages.

Education is a great shield against experience. It offers so much, ready-made and all from the best shops, that there's a temptation to miss your own life in pursuing the life of your betters.

Marriage isn't just domesticity, or the continuance of the race, or institutionalized sex, or a form of property right. And it damned well isn't happiness, as that word is generally used. I think it's a way of finding your soul.

Nobody ever reads the same book twice.

I managed to make it clear that what I most wanted was time to grow up. The war had not matured me; I was like a piece of meat that is burned on one side and raw on the other, and it was on the raw side I needed to work,. I thanked her, as well as I could, for what she had done for me.

You are still young enough to think that torment of the spirit is a splendid thing, a sign of a superior nature. But you are no longer a young man; you are a youngish middle aged man, and it is time you found out that these spiritual athletics do not lead to wisdom.

Wisdom may be rented...on the experience of other people, but we buy it at an inordinate price before we make it our own forever.

He gave me this advice one time: Never marry your childhood sweetheart, he said; the reasons that make you choose her will all turn into reasons why you should have rejected her.

If Francis has really made up his soul [...], what lies ahead of him? Hasn't he achieved the great end of life? —[...] Having got his soul under his eye, so to speak, Francis must now begin to understand it and be worthy of it [...]. Making up a soul isn't an end; it's the new beginning in the middle of life.

You'll go far. How do I know? Because life is goosing you so hard you'll never stop climbing.

Nobody gets through life without a broken heart. The important thing is to break the heart so that when it mends it will be stronger than before.

We come to God in little steps, not in a leap.

I was young once, and I wandered alone; The wide road was bewildering; I didn't know much. Then I met a friend and I felt very rich, For man is ever the joy of man.

to know how tall a tree is I must fall from the top; that is, desire burns.

The people of a city blessed with all the good things nature has can grow smug about who they are, can find complacency in livability polls, as if we did a lot to deserve it.

Our focus must be on what we need to change about ourselves-our attitudes, our words, our actions-even if our circumstances and the other people in our lives remain the same.

Yes, I am letting my own experience color my answer, which is what experience is for....

like a grain of sand that gets into an oyster's shell. What if the grain doesn't want to become a pearl? Is it ever asked to climb out quietly and take up its old position as a bit of ocean floor?

She laughed at him then, because he sounded like a small boy, not like a very large grown-up Beast with a voice so deep it made the hair on the back of your neck stir when you heard it. 'But vegetables are good for you,' she said, and added caressingly, 'They make you grow up big and strong.' He smiled, showing a great many teeth. 'You see why I wish to eat no more vegetables.

Little John, watching her standing next to her brother, half-glowering in the old Cecil manner and half-comforted by Robin's words, saw for a moment what it had been like for her as Will's litter sister. Some of what she was good at, and some of what she was bad at, as his pupil, came clear to him in that moment; and something else came clear to him too, but he set it aside so quickly that he allowed himself not to recognize it for what it was.

The rose shadows said that they loved the sun, but that they also loved the dark, where their roots grew through the lightless mystery of the earth. The roses said: You do not have to choose.

I liked that: a little pressure on the understood boundaries of yourself.

When spring came I dug up the garden and planted it, and weeded it, and prayed over it, and fidgeted; and almost three years of lying fallow had agreed with it, because it produced radishes the size of onions, potatoes the size of melons, and melons the size of small sheep. The herb border ran wild, and the air smelled wonderful.