Quotes About Growth

Language is a finding-place not a hiding place.

Going back after a long time will make you mad, because the people you left behind do not like to think of you changed, will treat you as they always did, accuse you of being indifferent, when you are only different.

Part broken - part whole, you begin again. ( from 'Why books seem shockproof against change.' THE TIMES: BOOKS)

I dream of flight, not to be as the angels are, but to rise above the smallness of it all. The smallnesss that I am. Against the daily death the iconography of wings.

The journey is not linear, it is always back and forth, denying the calendar, the wrinkles and lines of the body.

I don't want to conquer you; I just want to climb you.

We heal up through being loved, and through loving others. We don't heal by forming a secret society of one - by assessing about the only other 'one' we might admit, and being doomed to disappointment.

When I was born I became the visible corner of a folded map. The map has more than one route. More than one destination. The map that is the unfolding self is not exactly leading anywhere. The arrow that says YOU ARE HERE is your first coordinate. There is a lot that you can't change when you are a kid. But you can pack for the journey . . .

I'm always nervous about going home, just as I am nervous about rereading books that have meant a lot to me.

It is never too late to learn to love. But it is frightening.

How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps but on the whole just so, and them without warning you find the solid floor is a trapdoor and you are now in another place whose geography is uncertain and whose customs are strange?

Children do not find fault with their parents until later. In the beginning, the love you get is the love that sets.

He was always a little boy, and I am upset that I didn't look after him, upset that there are so many kids who never get looked after, and so they can't grow up. They can get older, but they can't grow up. That takes love. If you are lucky the love will come later. If you are lucky you won't hit love in the face.

There is always a city. There is always a civilization. There is always a barbarian with a pickaxe. Sometimes you are the city, sometimes you are the civilization, but to become that city, that civilization, you once took a pickaxe and destroyed what you hated, and what you hated is what you did not understand.

We don't know who we are or how to function, much less how to bloom. Blind nature. Homo sapiens. Who's kidding whom?

The trouble with babies is that they are made like a safe- no way to see what's inside and no guarantee that the effort will be worth the trouble. spin the numbers, crack the code, but the door won't swing open. Babies are safes on time-delay. It takes years for the door to swing open, and even when it does, the best minds are undecided as to the value of the contents

I have come so far so fast that I haven't had time to ask whether or not this is where I want to be

I always say to people who want to write: Live life! Don't stand on the rim, don't sit on the sidelines. Make mistakes, make a mess, get it wrong. Read everything, and get out and be in life.

I thought I might become someone else in time, grafted on to something better and stronger. And then I saw that the running away was a running towards. An effort to catch up with my fleet-footed self, living another life in a different way.

And the people I have hurt, the mistakes I have made, the damage to myself and others, wasn't poor judgement; it was the place where love had hardened into loss.

It seems to me that being the right size for your world-- and knowing that both you and your world are not by any means fixed dimensions-- is a valuable clue to learning how to live.

Round and round he walked, and so learned a very valuable thing: that no emotion is the final one.

moss that is concentrating on being green.

It was very bad for me that my deafness happened at around the same time as I discovered my clitoris.