Quotes About Growth

The woods is old enough to be fairly free of undergrowth. I go along slowly, watching for whatever may present itself.

I remember too how spring came, just when I thought it might stay winter forever, at first in little touches and strokes of green lighting up the bare mud like candle flames, and then it covered the whole place with a light pelt of shadowy grass blades and leaves. And I remember how, as the days and the winds passed over, the foliage shifted and sang.

I would be back in my garden all the time, working or just looking….I knew better than to expect a visible difference in an hour, but I looked anyhow.

The most exemplary nature is that of the topsoil...It increases by experience, by the passage of seasons over it, growth rising out of it and returning to it, not by ambition or aggressiveness. It is enriched by all things that die and enter into it. It keeps the past, not as history or as memory, but as richness, new possibility...

The pasture, bleached and cold two weeks ago, Begins to grow in the spring light and rain;

Mattie was a grown woman in love, and they had to let her go, with their blessing, enduring what could not be helped. And there was no use in thinking of that fluid, glistening instant that always seems, in looking back, to have come between what might have happened and what happened, when one might have made some little choice that would have changed forever the course of things.

No longer does human life rise from the earth like a pyramid, broadly and considerately founded upon its own sources. Now it scatters itself out in a reckless horizontal sprawl, like a disorderly city whose suburbs and pavements destroy the fields.

Well, sir," Athey said, "where I used to be limber I'm stiff and where I used to be stiff I'm limber. Do you know what I'm talking about?

But all those who were there, if they had lived past childhood, had twice in this world, first and last, been as helpless as a little child.

The warmth has come. The doors have opened. Flower and song Embroider ground and air, lead me Beside the healing field that waits; Growth, death, and a restoring form Of human use will make it well. But I go on, beyond, higher In the hill's fold, forget the time I come from and go to, recall This grove left out of all account, A place enclosed in song.

It was as though I knew without exactly knowing, or felt, or smelled in the air, the already accomplished fact that nothing would ever be simple for me again. I never again would be able to put my life in a box and carry it away.

It bears the gnarls of its history healed over. It has risen to a strange perfection in the warp and bending of its long growth. It has gathered all accidents into its purpose. It has become the intention and radiance of its dark fate.

In choosing what is difficult we are free, the mind too making its little flight out from the shadow into the clear in time between work and sleep.

I hardly knew what I knew, let alone what I was going to learn.

For many, the whole process of intellectual and literary growth is a movement, not through or beyond, but away from the people and society they know best, the faiths they still at bottom accept, the little raw provincial world for which they keep an apologetic affection.

I pursued education not instead of being a good mother, but because being a good mother required that I build a better life for my family.

We spend our lives trying to fill the empty places in our souls that lobe never got to, where there wasn't enough water to reach our roots; its those deficits that often have the biggest impacts on us and that shape us the most. Whatever the void created in those early formative years, I think it's part of who I became as an adult

If nothing ever changed, there would be no such things as butterflies.

A wise man once remarked that we can count how many seeds are in the apple, but not how many apples are in the seed.

If being a girl is a frontier all its own, what is the manifest destiny?

Change is growth; love is never lost.

Whenever we proceed from the known into the unknown we may hope to understand, but we may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word 'understanding.

Maybe with good luck we'll find what eluded us in the places we once called home.

proof. It will come in its own time and in its own way. What I can do is describe how I have learned to use it