Quotes About Growth

I wrote an article for The Women's Earth recently. I described a school I worked in where I gave all the children a potted spider plant and told them to look after it for a week like a daddy or mommy looks after a baby. Each child chose which parent they were going to emulate. This lovely little Jamaican boy, Winston, chose his daddy. The next week his mother phoned and asked why I'd asked Winston to feed his plant Pepsi and put it in front of the television.

Kiki began to giggle. Now Howard let go of Zora and held his wife instead, gripping he from behind. His arms could not go entirely around her, but still they walked in this manner down the small hill towards the gates of the park. This was one of the little ways in which eh said sorry. They were meant to add up each day.

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.

And now I found I couldn't stay small, my eyes stayed closed but my voice lifted, and kept lifting, I got louder and louder, I did not feel I had control of it, exactly, it was something I'd released that now rose up and away and escaped my reach.

It dawned on me that he saw me as a sort of child, someone to be treated with kid gloves and presented with reality by degrees.

You came in with a picky head, uneven and coarse, disguised underneath a baseball cap, and you left swiftly afterwards a new man, smelling sweetly of coconut oil and with a cut as sharp and clean as a swear word.

Now, every time I learn something more about him, I like him less. So you see, we were better off the way we were.

There's no woodland or forest-like aspect but it does feel like the middle of something, and wisdom finally arrives, even if only as an awareness that inside the adult flesh cages lurk the exact same children.

We will never be perfect: that is our limitation.

Those who read Middlemarch in that way will find little in Their Eyes Were Watching God to please them. It's about a girl who takes some time to find the man she really loves. It is about the discovery of self in and through another.

They don't mind what their kids do in life as long as they're reasonably, you know, healthy. Happy. And every single fucking day is not this huge battle between who they are and who they should be, what they were and what they will be.

At a certain point you have to leave childish things behind, and one of the childish things is a sense that 'Wow, I can draw' or in my case 'Wow, I can read'... You feel you have what's called a talent, but as you become an adult, if you hope to make things, you have to give up the preoccupation with talent otherwise you'll spend your life painting beautiful pictures of fruit bowls that look like fruit bowls.

My childhood took place in the widening gap.

Even the simplest ideas I'd brought with me did not seem to work

can." I didn't think it was true, but it was kind and I clung to it and kept taking the class, and

Svaka knjiga, svaki svezak koji vidiš, ima dušu. Dušu onoga koji ju je napisao i onih koji su je ?itali, proživeli i uz nju sanjarili. Svaki put kada knjiga pre?e iz ruke u ruku, svaki put kad neko pogledom preleti njene stranice, njen duh raste i ja?a. Karlos Ruis Safon: Senka vetra

When you're hurt, you feel stupid because you think you should have seen it coming. But if we knew everything that was going to happen to us we wouldn't get out of bed in the morning. All I'm saying is, open your mind and your heart to the possibilities.

Ages of rain had run down the slope, circling, eddying in depressions, wearing deep round holes. There had been dry seasons, accumulations of dust, wind-blown seeds, and cedars rose wonderfully out of solid rock. But these were not beautiful cedars. They were gnarled, twisted, into weird contortions, as if growth were torture, dead at the tops, shrunken, gray, and old. Theirs had been a bitter fight.

Men rise on steppin'-stones of their dead selves to higher things!...

nuestros ojos reflejan una pregunta apacible como un espejo que ya no enmohece el aliento cada día renuevo mi mirar cada día va creciendo mi tacto con el cosquilleo de la cercanía de tantas cosas.

You play grown-up long enough and you lose your perspective on right and wrong

You don't have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great

You are what you are and you are where you are because of what has gone into your mind. You change what you are and you change where you are by changing what goes into your mind.

Failure is an event not a person