Quotes About Growth

So you believe people can't change? That once you do a bad thing, you're a bad person? I don't know, I admit.But I do think that some stains never wash out.

I know every line of his face. The one that was carved the first year of our marriage, by laughing so often. The one that was born of worries the year he left the contracting companies to go into business for himself. The one developed from focusing hard on Nathaniel as he took his first steps, said his first words.

Just because you choose to leave a place did not mean that you could escape taking it with you. A man and a woman who lived together long enough might swap traits, until they found parts of themselves in each other. Jettison a personality and you just might find it taking up residence in the heart of the person you loved most.

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

The human capacity for burden is like bamboo - far more flexible than you'd ever believe at first glance.

Danger came in different packages, at different points in a lifetime.

And when your wife is not the same person you fell in love with eight years ago, where exactly does that leave you? Do you try to get to know who she has become, and hope for the best? Or do you keep deceiving yourself in the hope that she might wake up one morning and have gone back to the woman she used to be? May be, Caleb thinks with a small shock, he isn't the same person he once was, either.

When Em and I got back together, I could see that she had never been less than what I'd figured her to be. If anything, she was always better than I remebered. And that what I think love is [...] When your hindsight´s twenty-twenty, and you still wouldn´t change a thing.

If only you could keep them that way: cast in amber, never growing up

Cinta bukanlah suatu persamaan. Cinta bukan suatu kontrak, dan bukan suatu akhir yang bahagia. Cinta adalah papan tulis di bawah kapur tulis, tanah dari mana gedung-gedung muncul, dan oksigen dalam udara. Cinta adalah tempat aku kembali, ke mana pun aku pergi.

All I'm saying is that the past is nothing but a springboard for the future.

the shell that forms around a piece of sand looks to some people like an irritation, and to others, like a pearl.

It was a hairline crack, one might never have noticed, except for the fact it grew wider and wider, until there was a canyon between them. A child's job, ostensibly, was to grow up. So why, when it happened, did a parent feel so disappointed?

It's silly to anthropomorphize bread, but I love the fact that it needs to sit quietly, to retreat from touch and noise and drama, in order to evolve. I have to admit, I often feel that way myself.

Daniel understood that in the blink of an eye you might reinvent yourself. He understood that the person you were yesterday might not be the person you are tomorrow.

This sort of obsessing would get him nowhere. He needed to move on, to get going, to look forward.

My mother nods toward Violet and her little friend, sprinkling grass over their mud pies. "This has been going on so much longer than either of us, Kennedy. From where you stepped in, in your life, it looks like we've got miles to go. But me?" She smiles in the direction of the girls. "I look at that, and I guess I'm amazed at how far we've come." —

She isn't the girl who used to live next door, hasn't been for years. Back then she had freckles and jeans with holes at the knees and a ponytail yanked so tight it made her eyes pull at the corners. Now she wears pantyhose and tailored suits; she has had the same short bob hairstyle for five years. But when Patrick gets close enough, she still smells like childhood to him.

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.

Well, I had the other problem, I told him. I had the heart of the relationship, and no body to grow it in. What happened then? What else, I said. It broke.

If, even after you make what everyone considers to be the biggest mistake of your life, you stop thinking it's a mistake and may be see it as the best thing that ever could have happened.

The only way you can tell how far you've come is to know where you started.

In a lot of ways, having a teenager isn't all that different from having a newborn. You learn to read the reactions, because they're incapable of saying exactly what it is that's causing pain.

Children are supposed to go to school, play on swing sets, skin their knees.