Quotes About Growth

Attitude, not Aptitude, determines Altitude.

Make failure your teacher, not your undertaker.

Expect the best. Prepare for the worst. Capitalize on what comes.

She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all came to her. She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight.

I had hundreds of books under my skin already. Not selected reading, all of it. Some of it could be called trashy. I had been through Nick Carter, Horatio Alger, Bertha M. Clay and the whole slew of dime novelists in addition to some really constructive reading. I do not regret the trash. It has harmed me in no way. It was a help, because acquiring the reading habit early is the important thing. Taste and natural development will take care of the rest later on.

Grown people know that they do not always know the way of things, and even if they think they know, they do not know where and how they got the proof.

There is two things everybody got to find out for theirselves. They got to find out about love and they got to find out about living.

From barren brown stems to glistening leaf-buds; from the leaf-buds to snowy virginity of bloom…It was like a flute song forgotten in another existence and remembered again. What? How? Why? This singing she heard that had nothing to do with her ears. The rose of the world was breathing out smell. It followed her through all her waking moments and caressed her in her sleep.

So Janie waited a bloom time, and a green time and an orange time.

Janie's first dream was dead, so she became a woman.

Look lak we done run our conversation from grass roots tuh pine trees.

Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches.

Ah done growed ten feet higher from jus' listenin' tuh you, Janie. Ah ain't satisfied with mahself no mo'. Ah means tuh make Sam take me fishin' wid him after this.

Oh to be a pear tree—any tree in bloom! With kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world! She was sixteen. She had glossy leaves and bursting buds and she wanted to struggle with life but it seemed to elude her. Where were the singing bees for her?

But we see something else: the nobility of a soul that has suffered to the point almost of erasure, and still it struggles to be whole, present, giving. Growing in love, deepening in understanding. Cudjo's wisdom becomes so apparent, toward the end of his life, that neighbors ask him to speak to them in parables. Which he does. Offering peace.

But, don't care how firm your determination is, you can't keep turning round in one place like a horse grinding sugar cane.

She didn't read books so she didn't know that she was the world and the heavens boiled down to a drop. Man attempting to climb to painless heights from his dung hill.

There are years that ask questions and years that answer. Janie had had no chance to know things, so she had to ask. Did marriage end the cosmic loneliness of the unmated? Did marriage compel love like the sun the day? In

Time makes everything old so the kissing, young darkness became a monstropolous old thing while Janie talked.

She often spoke to falling seeds and said, Ah hope you fall on soft ground, because she had heard seeds saying that to each other as they passed.

Janie's first dream was dead, so she became a woman.

Oh to be a pear tree—any tree in bloom! With kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world!

Well, if yo' mind is already made up, 'tain't nothin' nobody kin do. But you'se takin' uh awful chance." "No mo' than Ah took befo' and no mo' than anybody else takes when dey gits married. It always changes folks, and sometimes it brings out dirt and meanness dat even de person didn't know they had in 'em theyselves.

are years that ask questions and years that