Quotes About Growth

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.

Some things don't leave us. We just learn to live with them better.

He's almost an adult. We have to save ourselves sometimes, Maggie. You should know that.

I see all the kids—the popular ones, the brains, the jocks, the punks, the burnouts. They are not who they will become. This moment, teenage life, it feels like the whole universe, but it's only a millisecond.

Her mother always said that when you were sad or worried or angry, that you had to do something. Anything. Go for a walk. Make cookies. Draw a picture. Clean your room. Never just lie there and feel sad or mad, because those feelings become like weights, holding you down, and they only get heavier, and you only get less likely to move them.

Where I train we smack our palms and knuckles against cinderblocks. This action creates tiny fissures in the bones. When those fissures heal, the bone is stronger. I can put the blade of my palm through a two-by-four.

Don't we reveal ourselves slowly, in parts, to the people we are starting to love? Don't we pick and choose what we want them to see and when? Aren't we afraid to be judged or rejected because of who we are, at least a little at first, until we grow more intimate, feel safer beneath each other's gazes?

A better reason why we, and other intelligent species, are born with such poorly developed brains is so that we can learn.

A good boss asks what part she could have played in the problem. And then she asks herself what she can do better next time.

Are you nervous about no longer being a big fish in a small pond?

The hardest thing about being a parent is watching your kids make mistakes. Our instinct is to protect you. But you're right, Deenie. Sometimes we have to step aside and let you make them anyway. The best we can do is be there when you mess up.

What's wrong with mistakes? Not that I'd know. No one's ever let me make any.

Lisi Harrison

To climb steep hills requires a slow pace at first. William Shakespeare.

A relationship can push us into having to confront certain areas of life, even if natally we are neither predisposed nor well equipped to cope in that area.

You plant a seed thinking it's love. It's only when the thing starts putting down roots that you realise it's not growing the way it should. But by then it's too late. It has sprouted foliage, blossomed and borne demented fruit. What do you do with the sickness in you?

Will it take the rest of my life to process what has happened? I don't know. If Freddy were here, he would say, 'Yet', as per the rules of a playful accord we have concerning unacquired knowledge, whereby if one of us said they didn't know something, the other had to say 'Yet'. And then the other one--usually me--would provide the missing information, or we'd look it up, or just speculate.

It's all very well going round with two fingers stuck up at the world, but what happens when the world turns round and sticks them back up at you? The world's a lot bigger than I am.

All that time I thought she was my future, I was wrong. She wasn't my future at all. She was the door to my future. But I'm through that door now, and ready to close it behind me.

A shade of sorrow passed over Taliesin's face. 'There are those,' he said gently, 'who must first learn loss, despair, and grief. Of all paths to wisdom, this is the cruelest and longest. Are you one who must follow such a way? This even I cannot know. If you are, take heart nonetheless. Those who reach the end do more than gain wisdom. As rough wool becomes cloth, and crude clay a vessel, so do they change and fashion wisdom for others, and what they give back is greater than what they won.

Stale water is a poor drink,' said Annlaw. 'Stale skill is worse. And the man who walks in his own footsteps only ends where he began.

we learn more by looking for the answer to a question and not finding it than we do from learning the answer itself.

For the odd thing about wisdom is the more you use it the more it grows; and the more you share, the more you gain. You'd be amazed how few understand that.

As a boy, he had dreamed of taking a man's place among men; and, as a boy, had deemed himself well fit to do so. Now, amid the grizzled, battle-wise warriors, his strength seemed feeble, his knowledge clouded.