Quotes About Growth

A very wise man once told me that you can't look back-you just have to put the past behind you, and find something better in your future.

When you're pregnant, you can think of nothing but having your own body to yourself again, yet after having given birth you realize that the biggest part of you is now somehow external, subject to all sorts of dangers and disappearance, so you spend the rest of your life trying to figure out how to keep it close enough for comfort. That's the strange thing about being a mother: until you have a baby, you don't even realize how much you were missing one.

And that was the greatest heartbreak of all- no matter how spectacular we want our children to be, no matter how perfect we pretend they are, they are bound to disappoint. As it turns out, kids are more like us than we think: damaged, through and through.

I had the heart of the relationship, and no body to grow it in... It broke.

I wonder if other mothers feel a tug at their insides, watching their children grow up into the people they themselves wanted so badly to be.

Who I am, and what I am capable of doing has always managed to surprise me.

No one ever asks a kid for her opinion, but it seems to me that growing up means you stop hoping for the best, and start expecting the worst.

Parents aren't the people you come from. They're the people you want to be, when you grow up.

What he did was wrong. He doesn't deserve your love. But he does deserve your forgiveness, because otherwise he will grow like a weed in your heart until it's choked and overrun. The only person who suffers, when you squirrel away all that hate, is you.

Here's what no one ever tells you about love: it hurts, having your heart broken

The bottom line in both cases is that people don't change; that no matter how charming you are and how fiercely you love, you cannot turn a person into something she's not.

something is always falling apart in me.

You did really great up there," I tell her, because I don't know how to say what I really want to: that the people you love can surprise you every day. That maybe who we are isn't so much about what we do, but rather what we're capable of when we least expect it.

A jewel's just a rock put under enourmous heat and pressure. Extraordinary things are always hiding in places people never think to look.

If you never go out on that limb, you're missing a hell of a view.

Well I talk a little about that, but I don't admit that from the beginning I knew we were not meant to be together.

Adults, light-years away from this, rolled their eyes and smirked and said, this too shall pass - as if adolescence was a disease like chicken pox, something everyone recalled as a mild nuisance, completely forgetting how painful it had been at the time.

When feeling came back, in a storm of color and force and sensation, the most you could do was hold on to the person beside you and hope you could weather it. Alex closed her eyes and expected the worst-but it wasn't a bad thing; it was just a different thing. A messier one, more complicated one. She hesitated, and then she kissed Patrick back, willing to concede that you might have to lose control before you could find what you'd been missing.

The hardest thing in the world is believing someone can change. It's always easier to go along with the way things are than to admit that you might have been wrong in the first place.

Maybe growing up is just focusing on what you've got, instead of what you don't.

It was a catch-22: If you didn't put the trauma behind you, you couldn't move on. But if you did put the trauma behind you, you willingly gave up your claim to the person you were before it happened.

There is a curious thing that happens with the passage of time: a calcification of character... Change isn't always for the worst; the shell that forms around a piece of sand looks to some people like an irritation, and to others, like a pearl.

People change, but only if you give them room to do it.

If you had to pack your whole life into a suitcase-not just the practical things, like clothing, but the memories of the people you had lost and the girl you had once been-what would you take?