Quotes About Growth

And sometimes, God asks us to wrestle with the unfamiliar until it becomes our new familiar. Until we can breathe freely in that new place.

When we narrate our experience, we take control of it. And in controlling the story of our past, we can create a better future.

Every couple starts off loving each other, don't they? It's how a relationship ends that really defines its nature.

But in the end, it's not just the big and small events that make you who you are, make your life what it is, it's how you choose to react to them. That's where you have control over your life.

You can put on a mask and a costume for the rest of the world, but you can't hide from the people who changed your diapers.

The woman I was seems hopelessly naive. I envy her.

You were never so acutely aware of your own flaws as you were in the presence of your child. Why was that?

IF YOU REALLY let life take you, if you release control and stop clinging to sameness, you can't imagine the places you'll end up. But most people don't do that. Most people get this death grip on what they know, and the only thing that loosens their grasp is some kind of tragedy.

We are changed by the things we experience. The big things, the small things have their impact and can't be undone. To judge those experiences, to hate the things that have happened to us is to hate who we've become because of them.

Ralph Waldo Emerson thought of weeds as plants "whose virtues had not yet been discovered.

When they're small, they're part of you, on you in bed, showering with you, climbing onto your lap, holding on to your leg. Slowly, slowly, they start to move away, and if you love them, if you want them to feel safe and free to explore the world, you have to let them go. Mostly.

We all make mistakes coming from our place of pain. When we know better, we do better.

Write it, said Beth. When we narrate our experience, we take control of it. And in controlling the story of our past, we can create a better future.

But there was something more true, more solid about loving someone through change.

The years grew over that embrace like a vine.

But the foliage of mundane life just grew over the past a bit every day if you let it. And maybe that was the most extraordinary event of all.

Hateful feelings could crop up in a marriage, like weeds pushing their way through concrete. If you weren't vigilant, they took over quickly, like kudzu, depriving love of light and air until it withered and died. It was a slow, silent death, impossible to imagine in the heat of new love.

Finley felt a fresh wash of tears, a desire to run toward Eloise, to cling and to hold on. But she didn't. She had already learned the most important lesson Eloise had to teach, though it still hurt like hell: Fear holds on. Love lets go. "Yes

What had amazed him, what amazed him still, even after all these years, was how quickly he'd stepped out of himself. He'd slipped off every convention and moral that had defined him, a great cowl that fell to the floor with the unfastening of a single closure. The person beneath it was someone he barely recognized.

He wondered what it would be like to grow up in one place and stay there all your life, to forever be defined by your childhood relationships, to never know if you got to be the person you wanted to be, to always be the person you were when you were young.

I want to unfold. Let no place in me hold itself closed, For where I am closed, I am false. Rainer Maria Rilke

Motherhood was a widening circle of good-byes.

The knowledge. Of life and all its pain, the decision to stick around and do better. That's what heroism is, you know?

But that was the hypocrisy of adulthood: You never wanted the children you cared about to do things you'd done when you were heedless of the fragility of life.