Quotes About Growth

hen you recognize that you will thrive not in spite of your losses and sorrows, but because of them, that you would not have chosen the things that happened in your life, but you are grateful for them, that you will hold the empty bowls eternally in your hands, but you also have the capacity to fill them? The word for that is healing.

Eight of the ten things you have decided about yourself at the age of twenty will, over time, prove to be false. The other two things will prove to be so true that you'll look back in twenty years and howl.

It was a world I'd never been to and yet had known was there all along, one I'd staggered to in sorrow and confusion and fear and hope. A world I thought would both make me into the woman I knew I could become and turn me back into the girl I'd once been.

Don't surrender all your joy for an idea you used to have about yourself that isn't true anymore.

we often become our kindest, most ethical selves only by seeing what it feels like to be selfish assholes first.

It was the thing that had grown in me that I'd remember years later, when my life became unmoored by sorrow. The thing that would make me believe that hiking the Pacific Crest Trail was my way back to the person I used to be.

Going down, I realized, was like taking hold of the loose strand of yarn on a sweater you'd just spent hours knitting and pulling it until the entire sweater unraveled into a pile of string. Hiking the PCT was the maddening effort of knitting that sweater and unraveling it over and over again. As if everything gained was inevitably lost.

Who would I be if I didn't? Who would I be if I did?

The most terrible and beautiful and interesting things happen in a life. For some of you, those things have already happened. Whatever happens to you belongs to you. Make it yours. Feed it to yourself even if it feels impossible to swallow. Let it nurture you, because it will.

Sometimes you'll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.

but because even in my darkest days-those very days in which I was naming myself-I saw the power of the darkness. Saw that, in fact, I had strayed and that I was a stray and that from the wild places my straying had brought me, I knew things I couldn't have known before.

The thing about rising is we have to continue upward; the thing about going beyond is we have to keep going.

The most terrible and beautiful and interesting things happen in a life. For some of you, those things have already happened. Whatever happens to you belongs to you. Make it yours. Feed it to yourself even if it feels impossible to swallow. Let it nurture you, because it will. I have learned this over and over and over again.

the thing that had grown in me that I'd remember

Monster was my world, my inanimate extra limb. Though its weight and size still confounded me, I'd come to accept that it was my burden to bear. I didn't feel myself in contradiction to it the way I had a month before. It wasn't me against it. We two were one.

There are so many tiny revolutions in a life, a million ways we have to circle around ourselves to grow and change and be okay.

The PCT had taught me what a mile was

They opened my mind to realities I didn't know existed. They forced me to be resilient, to sacrifice, to see how little I knew, and also how much.

They made my life big. They contributed to an education that money can't buy.

La vera sfida è vivere.

transformation often depends that we separate our emotional responses from our rational minds.

you are so goddamned young. Which means about eight of the ten things you have decided about yourself will over time prove to be false.

world I thought would both make me into the woman I knew I could become and turn me back into the girl I'd once been.

What if what made me do all those things everyone thought I shouldn't have done was what also had got me here? What