Quotes About Growth

It's not easy is it? Being a great man's son. You'd thought that would come with all kinds of advantages - with borrowed admiration, and respect. But it's only as easy as it is for the seeds of a great tree, trying to grow in its choking shadow. Not many make it to the sunlight for themselves.

Pain is the best schoolmaster, as you will soon discover.

There's no changing yesterday. Only tomorrow.

Course. Doing better next time. That's what life is.

Defeats do men far more good than victories.

If you want to be a new man you have to stay in new places, and do new things, with people who never knew you before. If you go back to the same old ways, what else can you be but the same old person? You have to be realistic.

Love is a strange animal. You can't always tame it and make it behave the way you want it to. For years, I thought I could. I thought I could use love the way I used lipstick and perfume. Just to get what I wanted. But real love isn't that way. Real love bangs you around and makes you do things you never thought you would do.

There are times for growing stronger and times for comforting, and sometimes both times see a few tears.

Love doesn't always come barreling down on you like a train engine. Sometimes it sneaks up on you like spring overtaking winter. The chill winds begin to warm and suddenly the trees have leaves and the flowers are blooming.

Coddling a body cheats 'em out of finding their own strength.

But love was like a candle, he had told her once. No matter how many candles you light from the first candle, the flame never goes smaller unless the wick is faulty.

I thought of how she'd been at three, at six, at nine. No one warns you about the losses. No one tells you you'll miss them, those earlier children. They disappear, but are they still there, sealed one inside the next like those little wooden Russian dolls?

It mattered most to me then because of where I was in my life. So in a way, there isn't just one book that matters most, there might be several, or even a dozen.

When you read a book, and who you are when you read it, makes it matter or not.

Time doesn't heal, I had learned, it just keeps moving. And it takes us with it.

In the library I was handed a blueprint on how to live the mysterious, unnamable, big dream life I wanted. I was handed books. And through reading them, I grew up to find that very life.

If life was really a journey, then children had to be the center of the wheel that moved it.

No hocus-pocus here. Just lots of living; it lends you some wisdom. Which I'm guessing is a trade-off for lost youth.

Opportunities are usually disguised as hard work, so most people don't recognize them.

Mom says,'What are you going to do when it's time to go to college?' I choose not to think about that yet. That is years away. For now, I just watn things all safe and familiar. My life may not be perfect, but it is what I have known. ~pg 16; Hattie on change

Don't worry about bitin' off more than you can chew. Your mouth is probably a whole lot bigger than you think.

Remember, you can't change anybody else. But you can write your own story differently.

What happened is baked into your bones, Edward. It lives under your skin. It's not going away. It's part of you and will be part of you every moment until you die. What you've been working on, since the first time I met you, is learning to live with that.

She was no longer who she used to be, and she wasn't yet whoever she was becoming.