Quotes About Growth

Metti insieme due persone che insieme non sono mai state; a volte il mondo cambia e a volte no. Può darsi che si schiantino e prendano fuoco, o che prendano fuoco e si schiantino. Ma a volte, invece, ne nasce qualcosa di nuovo, e allora il mondo cambia. Insieme, in quel primo momento esaltante, con quella sensazione esplosiva di ascesa, esse sono più grandi dei loro sé individuali. Insieme, vedono più lontano, più chiaro.

When you are in your twenties, if even if you're confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and of what you in life are, and might become.

Because once you had been through certain things, their presence inside you never really disappeared.

Yes, of course we were pretentious—what else is youth for?

That's what it feels like, anyway. Life isn't just addition and subtraction. There's also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure.

Who was it said that the longer we live, the less we understand?

I want a more difficult life, that's all. What I really want is a first-rate life. I may not get it, but the only chance I have lies in getting out of a second-rate life. I may fail completely, but I do want to try. It's to do with me, not you; so don't worry.

Had my life increased, or merely added to itself? This was the question Adrian's fragment set off in me. There had been addition—and subtraction—in my life, but how much multiplication? And this gave me a sense of unease, of unrest.

But time Ã¢â'¬Â¦ how time first grounds us and then confounds us. We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them. Time Ã¢â'¬Â¦ give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.

When you are in your twenties, even if you're confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and of what you in life are, and might become.

Isn't growing up a necessary process of losing one's innocence? Maybe, maybe not. But the trouble with life is, you rarely know when that loss is going to happen, do you? And how it will be, afterwards.

I had a friend who trained as a lawyer, then became disenchanted and never practiced. He told me that the one benefit of those wasted years was that he no longer feared either the law or lawyers.

Isn't there something between stagnation and heading somewhere?" "Like?" "Like having a nice time. Enjoy the day and all that?

My younger self had come back to shock my older self with what that self had been, or was, or was sometimes capable of being. And only recently I'd been going on about how the witnesses to our lives decrease, and with them our essential corroboration. Now I had some all too unwelcome corroboration of what I was, or had been.

You find yourself repeating, They grow up so quickly, don't they? when all you really mean is: time goes faster for me nowadays.

the complications of life do not end at the altar; some might say that this is where they begin.

There had been addition—and subtraction—in my life, but how much multiplication?

Love's elastic. It's not a question of watering down. It adds on. It doesn't take away. So there's no need to worry about that.

La vida no es sólo una suma y una resta. Es también la acumulación, la multiplicación de pérdidas, de fracasos.

Adrian also took charge of his own life, he took command of it, he took it in his hands—and then out of them. How few of us—we that remain—can say that we have done the same? We muddle along, we let life happen to us, we gradually build up a store of memories. There is the question of accumulation, but not in the sense that Adrian meant, just the simple adding up and adding on of life. And as the poet pointed out, there is a difference between addition and increase.

One test might be whether, as the years pass, you come out better from your own story, or worse. To come out worse might indicate that you are being more truthful. On the other hand, there is the danger of being retrospectively anti-heroic: making yourself out to have behaved worse than you actually did can be a form of self-praise.

Had my life increased, or merely added to itself? This

How were we to know that our lives had in any case begun, that some advantage had already been gained, some damage already inflicted?

His experience of life had left him with the belief that getting through the first sixteen years or so was fundamentally a question of damage limitation.