Quotes About Growth

perhaps because much further back I had had to face certain difficulties until I decided to accept the fact that a man must be what he is, life must be lived as it is… and you cannot live at all if you do not learn to adapt yourself to your life as it happens to be."128

Sometimes we surrender a feeling and we notice that it returns or continues. This is because there is more of it yet to be surrendered

What remains of your past if you didn't allow yourself to feel it when it happened? If you don't have your experiences in the moment, if you gloss over them with jokes or zoom past them, you end up with curiously dispassionate memories. Procedural and depopulated. It's as if a neutron bomb went off and all you're left with are hospital corridors, where you're scanning the walls for familiar photographs.

One day reach idealization; after all, it's the journey, not the destination.

You don't think your way to a new way of living. You live your way to a new way of thinking.

Our mistakes and regrets are not barriers to becoming who we can be; they are a necessary ingredient.

We tell ourselves that intimacy (and marriage) takes two people who are willing to work at it-but, unfortunately, we rarely have the slightest inkling of our job assignments in this project.

Did I pick the right person? This question inverts the starting and ending points. We do not pick our perfect match because we ourselves are not perfect. The universe hands us a flawless diamond—in the rough. Only if we are willing to polish off every part of ourselves that cannot join do we end up with a soul mate.

Nobody's Ready for Marriage—Marriage Makes You Ready for Marriage

People don't want to calm down because then they see things they sort of knew but didn't want to face.

Wanting creates the space in which our highest aspirations come into being.

as partners become better able to self-confront and self-soothe, they have less need to control each other. They can maintain their own emotional stability and worry less about what their partner is doing. They stop expecting their partner to understand them and focus more on understanding themselves, which, in turn, reduces defensiveness and combativeness, and encourages good will and growth rather than resistance and stagnation.

I wasn't broken, just resting, readying myself for the next big thing.

Living in a foreign country is one of those things that everyone should try at least once. My understanding was that it completed a person, sanding down the rough provincial edges and transforming you into a citizen of the world. What I find appealing in life abroad was the inevitable sense of helplessness it would inspire. Equally exciting would be the work involved in overcoming that helplessness. There would be a goal involved, and I like having goals.

Look at yourself on the day that you graduated from college, then look at yourself today. I did that recently and it was like, 'Yikes! What the hell happened?

Following a brief period of hard-won independence she came to appreciate the fact that people aren't foolish as much as they are kind. Peg understood that at a relatively early age. Me, it took years.

As a child I assumed that when I reached adulthood, I would have grown-up thoughts. By this I meant that I would stop living in a fantasy world; that, while standing in line for a hamburger or my shot at the ATM, I would not daydream about befriending a gorilla or inventing a pill that would make hair waterproof.

That be common for I, also, but be more strong, you. Much work and someday, you talk pretty. People start love you soon. Maybe tomorrow, okay.

February 16, 1988 Reasons to live: 1. Christmas 2. The family beach trip 3. Writing a published book 4. Seeing my name in a magazine 5. Watching C. grow bald 6. Ronnie Ruedrich 7. Seeing Amy on TV 8. Other people's books 9. Outliving my enemies 10. Being interviewed by Terry Gross on "Fresh Air

My understanding was that it completed a person, sanding down the rough provincial edges and transforming you into a citizen of the world.

living in a foreign country is one of those things that everyone should try at least once. My understanding was that it completed a person, sanding down the rough provincial edges and transforming you into a citizen of the world.

weeks passed, my suitcase grew more and more conventional. "I've got something for you," I'd say to a teenager. "It's nothing huge

The fetus was minute - a congregation of loitering cells - and as with anything that informal, there was a good chance that it might disperse.

It doesn't mean that you've fallen out with the person you used to be closest to but that you've merged into someone else's lane, or had him or her merge into yours.