Quotes About Growth

If I had met you for the first time tonight, I would have despised you. You put me in mind of Regal." "Did I? Well, perhaps that reflect my belief that there is something to be learned from everyone that we meet.

I think I made a better boy than I do man, I admitted ruefully to the wolf. Why not wait until you've been at it a bit longer and then decide? he suggested.

E o que amastes, aquilo que ambos amastes verdadeiramente, não foi um ao outro. Foi a altura das vossas vidas. Foi a primavera dos vossos anos, e a vida a correr forte em vós, e a guerra à vossa parte e os vossos corpos fortes e perfeitos.

As we stood together and watched our boy walk down the lane to the main road, I wondered if I had ever been so insufferably young and sure of myself, but the ache in my heart had the pleasant afterglow of pride.

I had Hap still, I reminded myself, but on the heels of that thought I knew I did not. Hap was a young man striking out on his own. For me to cling to him now and make him the focus of my life would have been the act of a leech. So who was I, when I stood alone, stripped of all others? It was a difficult question. p. 449

Once you are a father, you have to try to be a better man than you truly are.

Why should not a mother say to herself, if I raise this child aright, if I love and care for her, she shall live a life that brings joy to those about her, and thus I have changed the world? Why should not the farmer that plants a seed say to his neighbor, this seed I plant today will feed someone, and that is how I change the world today?

To take what has happened to you and learn from it, instead of being trapped by it. Nothing is quite so destructive as pity, especially self-pity. No event in life is so terrible that one cannot rise above it.

You can't go back," she told him bluntly. Her voice was neither kind nor unkind. "That part of your life is over. Set it aside as something you have finished. Complete or no, it is done with you. No being gets to decide what his life is 'supposed to be.' 

Life does not wait for any of us to grow up.

Time is an unkind teacher, delivering lessons that we learn far too late for them to be useful. Years after I could have benefited from them, the insights come to me. Now

If you can read, you can learn anything.

Putting into the dragon had helped in the same way that cutting off an infected limb helped. Being rid of it was not the same as being healed of it.

Prudent men never trusted their luck. But Kennit had long ago decided that a man had to trust his luck in order for it to grow.

I have always been more curious than wise. Yet any wisdom I have ever gained has come to me from my curiosity. So I have never learned to turn away from it.

Tomorrow owes you the sum of your yesterdays. No more than that.

We cannot put old heads on young shoulders.

They had to grow and change. He told me that if the happy ending of the tale was just a return to how things had been at the beginning, well, what was the point of writing that story at all?

You'll do well, if you don't mire in self-pity. Self-pity only gets you more of the same. Don't waste time on it.

Web, what do you want of me?" I asked him at last. "Only to make you think," he answered soothingly. "Not to make you angry, though I seem to excel at that. Or perhaps your anger is always there, festering inside you, and I am the knife that lances the boil and lets it burst forth.

Nor is there any special wisdom in injuring oneself over and over. What is your loyalty to that pain? To abandon it will not lessen you

When I was younger, it was like life was a beautiful gift, wrapped in exquisite paper and adorned with ribbons. And I loved it, even though all I knew of it was the outside of the package. But in the last year or so, I've finally started to see there is something even better inside the package. I'm learning to see past the fancy wrappings, to the heart of things.

Very little worth knowing is taught by fear.

Tomorrow owes you the sum of your yesterdays. No more than that. And no less.