Quotes About Growth

Hay gente que nunca fue más allá de los sesenta, o que no fue más allá de la guerra, o no más allá de aquella noche en que el grupo en el que tocaban actuaron como teloneros de los Rolling Stones en el Marquee, y luego se han pasado el resto de la vida caminando para atrás; yo nunca llegué a ir más allá de Charlie. Fue con ella cuando me ocurrió lo más importante, las cosas que aún me definen.

All I know is that you could, if you wanted to, find the answers to all sorts of difficult questions buried in that terrible war-torn interregnum between the first pubic hair and the first soiled Trojan.

Maybe the best thing to do with favorite films and books is to leave them be: to achieve such an exalted position means that they entered your life at exactly the right time, in precisely the right place, and those conditions can never be re-created.

Maybe the best thing to do with favourite books is to leave them be: to achieve such exalted position means that they entered your life at exactly the right time, in precisely the right place, and those conditions can never be recreated.

Once you stop pretending that everything's shitty and you can't wait to get out of it, which is the story I'd been telling myself for a while, then it gets more painful, not less. Telling yourself life is shit is like an anesthetic, and when you stop taking the Advil, then you really can tell how much it hurts, and where, and it's not like that kind of pain does anyone a whole lot of good.

and that there were many things grow-ups did which couldn't properly be judged by young people until the young people were grown-ups themselves...

and that there were many things grown-ups did which couldn't properly be judged by young people until the young people were grown-ups themselves...

The way to win our heart back is to venture again, to risk giving, receiving and trusting again, and of course to risk getting hurt again, but deciding to forgive and to no longer use the hurt or fear to keep ourselves in prison.

She could become anyone she wishes. But how will she know she is still herself?

I've reached the age where bruises are formed from failures within rather than accidents without.

When at last I came upon the right book, the feeling was violent: it blew open a hole in me that made life more dangerous because I couldn't control what came through it.

I would have let him go one finger at a time, until, without his realizing, he'd be floating without me. And then I thought, perhaps that is what it means to be a [parent] - to teach your child to live without you.

after all, who isn't a survivor from the wreck of childhood?

In the beginning it was always the same. But. I kept trying. Then one day I accidentally moved as the shutter clicked. A shadow appeared. The next time I saw the outline of my face, and a few weeks later my face itself. It was the opposite of disappearing.

The fact that you got a little happier today doesn't change the fact that you also became a little sadder. Every day you become a little more of both, which means that right now, at this exact moment, you're the happiest and saddest you've ever been in your whole life.

She was gone, and all that was left was the space where you'd grown around her, like a tree that grows around a fence.

Sometimes I forget that the world is not on the same schedule as I. That everything is not dying, or that if it is dying it will return to life, what with a little sun and the usual encouragement. Sometimes I think: I am older than this tree, older than this bench, older than the rain. And yet. I'm not older than the rain. It's been falling for years and after I go it will keep on falling.

Having begun to feel, people's desire to feel grew. They wanted to feel more, feel deeper, despite how it sometimes hurt. People became addicted to feeling. They struggled to uncover new emotions.

In the months after the relationship ends, a person can seem to grow at a lightning rate, like in a nature documentary where weeks of footage is run at high speed to show a plant unfurling in seconds, but in reality the person has been growing all along, under the surface, and it is only in their new freedom, in their hair-raising aloneness, that the person can allow for these underground things to break through and unfurl themselves in the light.

The more I've learned in my life, the more acutely I've felt my hunger and blindness, and at the same time the closer I've felt to the end of hunger, the end of blindness. At times I've felt myself to be clinging onto the rim—of what I can hardly say without the risk of sounding ridiculous—only to slip and find myself deeper in the hole than ever. And there, in the dark, I find again in myself a form of praise for all that continues to crush my certainty.

Childhood is a process of slowly recomposing oneself out of the borrowed materials of the world.

Se había ido, y lo único que quedaba era el espacio en que habías crecido en torno a ella, rodeándola, como crece un árbol rodeando una cerca.

It's barely alive, but it is alive. More brown than green. There are parts that have withered. But still it lives, leaning always to the left. Even when I rotate it so that what faced the sun no longer faces the sun, it stubbornly leans to the left, choosing against physical need in favor of an act of creativity. I poured the rest of my water into its pot. What does it mean, anyway, to flourish?

She was one of a group of girls he'd observed bloom from scraggly weeds into tropical beauties who churned the air around them into a dense humidity.