Quotes About Growth

Young minds - young brains - need stories and ideas like the ones in those [censored and banned] books in order to grow. They need ideas that you disagree with. They need ideas that I disagree with. Or they'll never be able to figure out what ideas they believe in.

Never risking anything meant never having or doing or being anything either. Life is risk, it turned out.

It was funny how just when you thought you knew yourself through and through, you stumbled on a new kind of strength, a fresh reserve of power inside you that you never knew you had, and all at once you found yourself burning a little brighter and hotter than you ever had before.

Magic doesn't come from talent, it comes from pain.

But you couldn't mourn forever. Or you could, but as it turned out there were better things to do.

What makes you think what happened to you on Earth wasn't an adventure?

When he graduated he'd thought life was going to be like a novel, starring him on his own personal hero's journey, and that the world would provide him with an endless series of evils to triumph over and life lessons to learn. It took him a while to figure out that wasn't how it worked.

Becoming me was the greatest creative project of my life.

Facing up to the nightmare of the past is what gives you the power to build your future.

Some people need their families to become who they're supposed to be. And there's nothing wrong with that. But there are other ways to do it.

Wishes are for children," Jane Chatwin said. "I grew up.

Life was good. It was funny how just when you thought you knew yourself through and through, you stumbled on a new kind of strength, a fresh reserve of power inside you that you never knew you had, and all at once you found yourself burning a little brighter and hotter than you ever had before.

There are things that a man must do, that a god may not. He who completes a quest does not merely find something. He becomes something.

June ripened into July, then burst and withered and dried and became August.

Age is wasted on the young. Just like youth.

She was young enough that all she had to do was kid things, but she was also getting old enough that she wanted to do more than play games and pretend.

Never risking anything meant never having or doing or being anything either.

Life was briskly and efficiently stripping Quentin of his last delusions about himself, one by one, shucking them off in firm hard jerks like wet clothes, leaving him naked and shivering.

A new thought happens and a new plant springs up. A feeling fades away and the plant dies. Some of the more common ones are always in bloom—fear, anger, happiness, love, envy. They're quite unruly, they grow like weeds. Certain basic mathematical ideas never go away either. But others are quite rare. Complex concepts, extreme or subtle emotions. Awe and wonder are harder to find than they once were.

Onward and upward.

That was the thing about the world: it wasn't that things were harder than you thought they were going to be, it was that they were hard in ways that you didn't expect.

There were things he'd been scared to face his whole life, and now that he was looking them in the eye they weren't quite as scary as he first thought.

By now he had learned enough to know that when he was getting annoyed at somebody else, it was usually because there was something that he himself should be doing, and he wasn't doing it.

It was too easy, and he'd had enough of doing things the easy way.