Quotes About Growth

Our lives together, our duet, also continues to evolve, and even if we can't go back to how it was, we're designing a good life for us, in spite of everything.

What remained would gradually acquire its own shape and dimension, but many of our favorite things, my favorite ways of being a couple, had vanished and it was no use pretending, hoping, wishing that he would return to his old self, and me to mine. [p. 156]

Without memories we wouldn't know who we are, how we once were, who we'd like to be in the memorable future. We are the sum of our memories.

I understood the therapists were trying to rebuild Paul's vocabulary, beginning wit the rudiments, but Paul found it taxing, boring, and disturbingly condescending. His loss of language didn't mean he was any less a grown-up with adult feelings, experiences, worries, and problems. [p. 144]

The faint pink coating the treetops promised rippling buds, a sure sign of spring hastening in, right on schedule, and the animal world getting ready for its fiesta of courting and mating, dueling and dancing, suckling and grubbing, costume-making and shedding-in short, the fuzzy, fizzy hoopla of life's ramshackle return.

Our mistakes are legion, but our talent is immeasurable.

husk or shell that has grown up around a spark of holiness, masking its light (203): Michael Wex, Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2005), p. 93.   Yiddish's

Few things are begun with as much hope as a garden, and it can disappoint in direct proportion to one's anticipation.

You have to make peace with the past or you can never move into the future

The spear in the Other's heart is the spear in your own: you are he. There is no other wisdom, and no other hope for us but that we grow wise. -attributed to Surak

Much of what she found charming and refreshing about him at the outset of their relationship now bugged the hell out of her.

Time has passed. Things have happened. More time will pass. More things will happen. I have become myself again, but I am not the same. Perhaps that is a good thing... This is my life and I'm going to live it.

Diane Setterfield

I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy. And yet I cannot pretend that the reading I have done in my adult years matches in its impact on my soul the reading I did as a child. I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Yet it is not the same.

Boys do not leave their boyhood behind when they leave off their school uniform.

My mother and I were like two continents moving slowly but inexorably apart; my father, the bridge builder, constantly extending the fragile edifice he had constructed to connect us.

I'd expected that I would expand to fit the experience automatically, that I would get my first glimpse of the person I was destined to be.

I cannot pretend that the reading I have done in my adult years matches in its impact on my soul the reading I did as a child.

I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy. And yet I cannot pretend that the reading I have done in my adult years matches in its impact on my soul the reading I did as a child.

He knows what reading is. How it takes you.

that. I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life

A child is not an empty vessel, Fleet, to be formed in whatever way the parent thinks fit. They are born with their own hearts and they cannot be made otherwise, no matter what love a man lavishes on them.

And yet I cannot pretend that the reading I have done in my adult years matches in its impact on my soul the reading I did as a child.

Consider bonsai There but for constricting bowl Would be a giant.