Quotes About Growth

Somewhere deep inside us we seem to know that we are destined for something better than strife.

None of us comes into the world fully formed. We would not know how to think, or walk, or speak, or behave as human beings unless we learned it from other human beings. We need other human beings in order to be human. I am because other people are.

Healing does not mean reversing. Healing does not mean that what happened will never again cause us to hurt. It does not mean we will never miss those who have been lost to us or that which was taken from us. Healing means that our dignity is restored and we are able to move forward in our lives.

When we stay stuck in the unhappy story of what we have done we deny ourselves the gift of transformation. Learning from our past is not the same as being held hostage by the things we have done. At some stage we must let go of the past and begin again.

It is important to tell your story. It is equally important not to get trapped in your story. It is not what happened to us that matters but how what happened hurt us.

The Archbishop was pointing his index fingers at his head. "You learn when something happens that tests you." And then he was pretending to be speaking as God might. "'Hello, you said you wanted to be more compassionate.' 'Hello, you wanted to be a little more laid-back.

Nuestra bondad crece cuando se le pone a prueba

The process we embarked on through the TRC was, as all real growth proves to be, astoundingly painful and profoundly beautiful.

The black person entered the booth one person and emerged on the other side a new, transfigured person.

Era ella como un bosque, como la oscura red de las ramas del roble, con un susurro inaudible de miles de yemas brotando. Y mientras tanto los pájaros del deseo dormían en la vasta maraña del laberinto de su cuerpo.

My father liked me, when I wasna being an idiot. And he loved me, too -- enough to beat the daylights out of me when I was being an idiot. Jamie Fraser

I hated him for as long as I could. But then I realized that loving him...that was a part of me, and one of the best parts. It didn't matter that he couldn't love me, that had nothing to do with it. But if I couldn't forgive him, then I could not love him, and that part of me was gone. And I found eventually that I wanted it back. ({Lord John, Drums of Autumn}

what I was born does not matter, only what I will make of myself, only what I will become.

You invent yourself...You look at other women-or men; you try on their lives for size. You take what you can use, and you look inside yourself for what you can't find elsewhere. And always...always...you wonder if you're doing it right.

But even things that heal leave scars.

marriage is made not in ritual or in words but in the living of it.

It was possible to leave things behind—places, people, memories—at least for a time. But places held tight to the things that had happened in them, and to come again to a place you had once lived was to be brought face-to-face with what you had done there and who you had been.

It gave him the same odd sense of dislocation, though; that sense of losing some valuable part of himself that could not survive the passage back to daily life. Each time, the passage became more difficult.

He wasn't a whole person any longer, but only half of something not yet made.

a marriage is made not in ritual or in words but in the living of it

He had changed, of course, but the change was subtle; as though he had been put into an oven and baked to a hard finish. He looked as though both muscle and skin had drawn in just a bit, grown closer to the bone, so he was more tightly knit; he had never seemed gawky, but the last hint of boyish looseness had vanished.

Maybe it was the result of gardening, that quiet sense of pleasure in touching growing things, the satisfaction of helping them thrive.

When ye ha' bairns, there's that wee time when ye really are all they need. And then they leave your arms and ye're scairt all over again, because now ye ken all the things that could harm them, and you not able to keep them from it.

There was a curious peace in this day, a sense of things working quietly in their proper courses, nothing minding the upsets and turmoils of human concerns. Perhaps it was the peace that one always finds outdoors, far enough away from buildings and clatter. Maybe it was the result of gardening, that quiet sense of pleasure in touching growing things, the satisfaction of helping them thrive.