Quotes About Growth

But all three of them had had to lose things in order to gain other things. Will had lost his shell and his cool and his distance, and he felt scared and vulnerable, but he got to be with Rachel; and Fiona had lost a big chunk of Marcus, and she got to stay away from the casualty ward; and Marcus had lost himself, and got to walk home from school with his shoes on.

Reading begets reading.

People go on about the first time being important, but it's the second time that really matters. Or the second person, anyway.

No time spent with a book is ever entirely wasted, even if the experience is not a happy one: there's always something to be learned. It's just that, every now and again, you hit a patch of reading that makes you feel as if you're pootling about… But what can you do about it? We don't choose to waste our reading time; it just happens. The books let us down.

Hard is trying to rebuild yourself, piece by piece, with no instruction book, and no clue as to where all the important bits are suppose to go.

We were little animals, which is not to imply that by the end of the week we were tearing our tank tops off; just that, metaphorically speaking, we had begun to sniff each other's bottoms, and we did not find the odor entirely repellent.

some things were better, some were worse, and the only way one can ever learn to understand one's own youth is by accepting both halves of the proposition.

See, I've always been afraid of marriage because of, you know, ball and chain, I want my freedom, all that. But when I was thinking about that stupid girl I suddenly saw it was the opposite: that if you got married to someone you know you love, and you sort yourself out, it frees you up for other things.

He was kind, he was single, he was vulnerable, he made her laugh (not always intentionally, true, but often enough). Every time she saw him, he seemed to have become a little more handsome.

He was a story at least, even if he never became anything else.

I feel as though I have been having conversations like this all my life. None of us is young anymore, but what has just taken place could have happened when I was sixteen, or twenty, or twenty-five. We got to adolescence and just stopped dead; we drew up the map then and left the boundaries exactly as they were.

It had only taken me six years to change from a ten-year-old to a sixteen-year-old; surely six years wasn't long enough for a transformation of that magnitude.

How had I managed to edit all this out in the intervening years? How had I managed to turn her into the answer to all the world's problems?

So, yes, of course I feel nostalgic, even if I am longing for a time which never really belonged to us: like I said, some things were better, some were worse, and the only way one can ever learn to understand one's own youth is by accepting both halves of the proposition.

those places are reserved for the kind of humiliations are heartbreaks that you're just not capable of delivering. That probably sounds crueler than it is meant to, but the fact is that we're too old to make each other miserable, and that's a good thing, not a bad thing...

like being able to see how I got from Deep Purple to Howlin' Wolf in twenty-five moves; I am no longer pained by the memory of listening to "Sexual Healing" all the way through a period of enforced celibacy, or embarrassed by the reminder of forming a rock club at school, so that I and my fellow fifth-formers could get together and talk about Ziggy Stardust and Tommy.

There aren't too many candlelit dinners and second honeymoons, I can tell you. We're beyond all that. We're good friends more than anything.

One of the problems, it seems to me, is that we have got it into our heads that books should be hard work, and that unless they're hard work, they're not doing us any good.

I remember the juvenile stuff, where you put your arm along the sofa and let it drop onto her shoulder, or press your leg against hers; I remember the mock-tough adult stuff I used to try when I was in my mid-twenties, where I looked someone in the eye and asked if they wanted to stay the night. But none of that seems appropriate anymore. What do you do when you're old enough to know better?

He was beginning to wonder whether June's facility, and their shared interest, might serve them better in the long run than a passionate sexual relationship that would eventually die on them.

We spent all those years talking about the stuff we had in common, and the last few months noticing all the ways we were different, and it broke both of our hearts.

we are what's happened to us.

Ecco che senso ha stare insieme. Tu hai un certo potenziale. E io sono qui per farlo emergere.»

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