Quotes About Growth

Maybe it doesn't matter that life never blossomed into something larger than itself.

Last year, when Zora was a freshman, sophomores had seemed altogether a different kind of human: so very definite in their tastes and opinions, in ther loves and ideas. Zora woke up this morning hopeful that a transformation of this kind might have visited her in the night, but, finding it hadn't, she did what girls generally do when they don't feel the part: she dressed it instead.

Other people's words are so important. And then without warning they stop being important, along with all those words of yours that their words prompted you to write. Much of the excitement of a new novel lies in the repudiation of the one written before. Other people's words are the bridge you use to cross from where you were to wherever you're going.

These children spend so much time demanding the status of adulthood from you - even when it isn't in your power to bestow it - and then when the real shit hits the fan, when you need them to be adults, suddenly they're children again.

Overnight everyone has grown up. While she was becoming, everyone grew up and became.

Like most children, theirs was a relation based on verbs, not nouns.

progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and reimagined if it is to survive.

A library is a different kind of social reality (of the three dimensional kind), which by its very existence teaches a system of values beyond the fiscal.

Four months in the life of a seventeen-year-old is the stuff of swings and roundabouts;... Never again in your life do you possess the capacity for such total personality overhaul.

The term 'role model' is so odious, but the truth is it's a very strong writer indeed who gets by without a model kept somewhere in mind. I think of Keats. Keats slogging away, devouring books, plagiarizing, impersonating, adapting, struggling, growing, writing many poems that made him blush and then a few that made him proud, learning everything he could from whomever he could find, dead or alive, who might have something useful to teach him.

when all the time it was that grand tree, taking up half the garden with its roots and not allowing anything else to grow.

They were real people who entertained and argued and existed entirely independently from him, although he had set the thing in motion. They had different thoughts and beliefs. ~ on children growing up.

Deal with the drops when you can see the ocean." "Another

Those are my bougainvillea—I got Victoria to plant them today, but I don;t know if they will survive. But Right now they have the appearance of survival, which is almost the same thing.

I'd decided to establish a new rule for myself: read for half an hour an evening, no matter what.

Porque el divorcio es eso: quitarle cosas que no ya no necesita a una persona a la que ya no quieres.

I knew my mother was in the process of becoming, or trying to become, "an intellectual," because my father often threw this term at her as a form of insult during their arguments.

But I was so much older then," sang Archie mischievously, quoting a ten-year-old Dylan track, arching his head round the door, "I'm younger than that now.

kids are like pissing cats or burrowing moles, marking off land within land, each section with its own rules, beliefs, laws of engagement.

Maybe it doesn't matter that life never blossomed into something larger than itself. Moored to the shore she set out from, as almost all women were, once.

Two people creating the time of their own lives, protected somehow by love, not ignorant of history but not deformed by it, either.

She could never simply sit somewhere and let time pass, she had to be learning something.

It hurts just as much as it is worth.

It looks backward, at the past, and it learns from what's gone before. Some people never learn." My