Quotes About Growth

This was the ghetto: where children grow down instead of up.

I think of the flower in the bud: huddled, compressed, dark. Yet somehow it feels the night, knows moon from sun. It waits...waits.

Cross the creek on the stepping stones of your failures.

A little hatred goes a long, long way. It grows and grows. And it's hungry. You keep feeding it more and more people, and the more it gets, the more it wants. It's never satisfied. And pretty soon it squeezes all the love out of your heart and all you'll have left is a hateful heart.

Every day brings a new memory of something we did a year ago. A parade of unhappy anniversaries.

Maniac Magee was not born in a dump.

Sooner or later the let-loose sidewalk pups will cross the streets. Running, they will run into each other. And sooner or later, as surely as noses drip downward, it will no longer be enough to merely run. They must run against something. Against each other. It is in their instinct.

I am rain. I like that most of all, being rain.

Let's promise to each other that if we ever meet again we will never plow and push our new-fallen snow. We will not become slush. We will stay like this field and melt away together only in the sun's good time.

Like so many of Archie's words, they seemed not to enter through my ears but to settle on my skin, there to burrow like tiny eggs awaiting the rain of my maturity, when they would hatch and I at last would understand.

I'm not my name. My name is something I wear, like a shirt. It gets worn, I outgrow it, I change it.

You're a kid trying to figure out the world you were born into, that's all.

OK, so you're not perfect. Who is?

Newborn leaf clusters on the surrounding trees had a look of pale green popcorn. Tufts of onion grass sprouted across the soccer field, releasing their sweet scent.

She taught me to revel.

Same old across-the-street Dorothy he had known all his life. And yet, somehow, not the same old Dorothy. Though she looked the same as always, Palmer had been seeing something else in her lately. Whatever it was, it registered not in his eyes but in his feelings, and was most clearly known to him by its absence in the company of anyone but her. It made him feel floating.

Life can be lived as a temporary arrangement. Life is a temporary arrangement! But the longer you go without changing, the more obscure the likelihood you ever will. After enough time passes, the idea of another way of life grows even more misty.

if you love your garden, you don't mind working in it, and waiting. Then in the proper season you will surely see it flourish.

And yet, with all its life, even at the peak of its bloom, the garden was its own graveyard. Under every tree and bush lay rotten trunks and disintegrated and decomposing roots. It was hard to know which was more important: the garden's surface or the graveyard from which it grew and into which it was constantly lapsing. For

We welcome the inevitable seasons of nature, yet we are upset by the seasons of our economy! How

A gardener! Isn't that the perfect description of what a real businessman is?

I'm going to call you Motherwort," I whispered, petting the baby fur as she scarfed down the food. "Wort for short, because motherwort is so good at healing girls, and this one right here"—I jabbed my thumb at myself—"has had a day.

Summer was coming.

No backsies. That was a terrible truth to learn before the age of fifteen, that some mistakes are forever.