Quotes About Growth

I think I could learn a little patience with myself if I took a view of myself that included concepts like dormancy (instead of laziness), seed planting (instead of just scattered), gestation (instead of doing-something-right-this-second).

As an artist, I do not need to be rich but I do need to be richly supported. I cannot allow my emotional and intellectual life to stagnate or the work will show it. My life will show it.

Remember that even if you have made a truly rotten piece of art, it may be a necessary stepping-stone to your next work. Art matures spasmodically and requires ugly-duckling growth stages.

Give yourself permission to be a beginner. By being willing to be a bad artist, you have a chance to be an artist, and perhaps, over time, a very good one.

But do you know how old I will be by the time I learn to really play the piano/act/paint/write a decent play?" Yes ... the same age you will be if you don't. So let's start.

Younger artists are seedlings. Their early work resembles thicket and underbrush, even weeds. The halls of academia, with their preference for lofty intellectual theorems, do little to support the life of the forest floor.

Creativity - like human life itself - begins in the dark

We must actively, consciously, consistently, and creatively nurture our artist selves.

Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock. JAMES BALDWIN

I think that I need to learn a few different modalities of change: gradual and grounded like a seed growing and, too, when it is time to leap lest I be left hanging over a chasm clutching frantically to either side. In other words, I may need to listen to guidance about when to edge forward and when to leap forward. What clearly does not serve me is trying to meet every situation with an obdurate set mode.

It is always necessary to acknowledge creative injuries and grieve them. Otherwise, they become creative scar tissue and block your growth.

True life is lived when tiny changes occur. LEO TOLSTOY Creative living requires the luxury of time, which we carve out for ourselves—even if it's fifteen minutes for quick morning pages and a ten-minute minibath after work.

The great acting coach Michael Chekhov advised his students, "If you want to work on your art, work on your life.

Often, when we say it is "too late" for us to begin something, what we are really saying is that we aren't willing to be a beginner. But when we are willing to dip our toe in, even just a little, we are rewarded with a sense of youthful wonder. Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never. —WINSTON CHURCHILL

Perfectionism is a refusal to let yourself move ahead. It is a loop—an obsessive, debilitating closed system that causes you to get stuck in the details of what you are writing or painting or making and to lose sight of the whole.

If we are invested in a writing life—as opposed to a writing career—then we are in it for the process and not the product.

Every blade of grass has its Angel that bends over it and whispers, "Grow, grow." THE TALMUD

The process of identifying a self inevitably involves loss as well as gain. We discover our boundaries, and those boundaries by definition separate us from our fellows. As we clarify our perceptions, we lose our misconceptions. As we eliminate ambiguity, we lose illusion as well. We arrive at clarity, and clarity creates change.

Man can learn nothing except by going from the known to the unknown. CLAUDE BERNARD

Our tears prepare the ground for our future growth.

Most of the time when we are blocked in an area of our life, it is because we feel safer that way. We may not be happy, but at least we know what we are—unhappy. Much fear of our own creativity is the fear of the unknown.

We tend to think of the rational as a higher order, but it is the emotional that makes our lives. One often learns more from ten days of agony than from ten years of contentment. MERLE SHAIN

Chief among these changes will be the triggering of synchronicity: we change and the universe furthers and expands that change. I have an irreverent shorthand for this that I keep taped to my writing desk: "Leap, and the net will appear.

Writing is a way not only to metabolize life but to alchemize it as well. It is a way to transform what happens to us in our own experience. It is a way to move from passive to active. We may still be the victims of circumstance, but by our understanding those circumstances we place events within the ongoing context of our own life, that is, the life we own.