Quotes About Growth

Beautiful things grow to a certain height and then they fail and fade off, breathing out memories as they decay. And just as any period decays in our minds, the things of that period should decay too, and in that way they're preserved for a while in the few hearts like mine that react to them. Trying to preserve a century by keeping its relics up to date is like keeping a dying man alive by stimulants.

But I suppose you must touch life in order to spring from it.

There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still.

one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty?one that everything afterward savors of anti?climax.

Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a charlatan in place of the warm balmy nights I dream of in April. It's a sad season of life without growth…It has no day.

Summer has no day,' she said. 'We can't possibly have a summer love. So many people have tried that the name's become proverbial. Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a charlatan in place of the warm balmy nights I dream of in April. It's a sad season of life without growth...it has no day.

And then, one fairy night, May became June.

he wanted people to like his mind again-after awhile it might be such a nice place in which to live.

I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

A man does not recover from such jolts-- he becomes a different person and, eventually, the new person finds new things to care about.

It's a funny thing about comin' home. Looks the same, smells the same, feels the same. You'll realize what's changed is you.

i was perhaps an egotist in youth, but i soon found it made me morbid to think too much about myself

i'm in a muddle about a lot of things -- i've just discovered that i've a mind, and i'm starting to read read what? everything. i have to pick and choose, of course, but mostly things that make me think.

The world is so overgrown that it can't lift its own fingers, and I was planning to be such an important finger-

There are no second acts in American lives.

Life is progressive, no matter what our intentions.

Life begins again when it gets crisp in the fall.

Now you've a clean start... you've brushed three or four ornaments down, and in a fit of pique knocked off the rest of them. The thing now is to collect some new ones, and the farther you look ahead in the collecting, the better, but remember, do the next thing.

Just as a cooling pot gives off heat, so all through youth and adolescence we give off calories of virtue. That's what's called ingenuousness.

You are bound to go up and down, just as I did in my youth, but do keep your clarity of mind, and if fools or sages dare to criticise don't blame yourself too much.

At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.

I wouldn't ask too much of her,' I ventured. 'You can't change the past.' 'Can't change the past?' he cried incredulously. 'Why of course you can!

Then I grew up, and the beauty of succulent illusions fell away from me. The fibre of my mind coarsened and my eyes grew miserably keen. Life rose around my island like a sea, and presently I was swimming.

her disposition is not all it should be; she wants what she wants when she wants it and she is prone to make every one around her pretty miserable when she doesn't get it—but in the true sense she is not spoiled. Her fresh enthusiasm, her will to grow and learn, her endless faith in the inexhaustibility of romance, her courage and fundamental honesty—these things are not spoiled.