Quotes About Growth

The beach ebbed and flowed, its curves changing with every winter season. Even the cliffs were different, carved by the rain and wind, by the claws of countless scrabbling lizards, by the seeds that stuck and sprouted in their cracks. Everything was united by the steady rise and fall of nature's breath. Everything except for me.

whatever tears might have been in me for that lost dream had been parched away.

But a cracked heart was not enough, and I had grown wise enough to know it. I kissed him and left him there.

Day upon patient day, you must throw out your errors and begin again. So why did I not mind? [...] For a hundred generations, I had walked the world drowsy and dull, idle and at my ease. I left no prints, I did no deeds. Even those who had loved me a little did not care to stay. Then I learned that I could bend the world to my will, as a bow is bent for an arrow.

I was giddy feeling his first kicks and I spoke to him every moment, as I crushed my herbs, as I cut clothes for his body, wove his cradle out of rushes. I imagined him walking beside me, the child and boy and man that he would be.

With every step I felt lighter. An emotion was swelling in my throat. It took me a long time to recognize what it was. I had been old and stern for so long, carved with regrets and years like a monolith. But that was only a shape I had been poured into. I did not have to keep it.

Tear down, I thought. Tear down and build again.

I had made so many mistakes that I could not find my way back through their tangle to the first one.

It is likely you are not a witch. But you are something else. Something you have not found yet. And that is why you go P.240

because I knew nothing, nothing was beneath me.

Every prince needs to know his lands, and there's no better way to learn than by grazing the goats.

In the old days I would have rushed forth with a brimming cup of answers, to give him all he wanted. But I was not the same as I had been.

There was after all no mystery in the end of love, no mystery but the mystery of love itself, which was large certainly but as real as grass, as natural and unaccountable as bloom and branch and their growth.

Well, do you do that consciously? Daily Alice asked, only partly of Cloud. Do what? Cloud said. Grow up? No. Well. In a sense. You see it's inevitable, or refuse to. You greet it or don't -- take it in trade, maybe, for all you're going to lose anyway. Or you can refuse, and have what you've got to lose snatched from you, and never take payment -- never see a trade is possible.

Everybody grows up by leaps, and not by a steady climb like a mountaineer.

I always tried to turn every disaster into an opportunity

are too many mouths to feed. One million three hundred thousand more every week! And of all the people who have ever been alive on Earth, more than half are living right now. We are gnawing the planet bare

I needed a slob summer. The machine was abused. Softness at the waist. Tremor of the hands. Bad tastes in the morning. A heaviness of muscle and bone, a tendency to sigh. Each time you wonder, Can you get it back? The good toughness and bounce and tirelessness, the weight down to a rawhide two oh five, a nasty tendency to sing during the morning shower, the conviction each day will contain wondrous things?

In all emotional conflicts, the thing you find the most difficult to do, is the thing that you should do. --Meyer's Law

There are middle-aged children who spend a part of every day thinking of their college or their war, but the ones who grow up to be men do not have this plaintive need for a flavor of past importance, and Callowell was one of these.

There are middle-aged children who spend a part of every day thinking of their college or their war, but the ones who grow up to be men do not have this plaintive need for a flavor of past importance

Education is something which should be apart from the necessities of earning a living, not a tool therefor.

boy. I have a shallow, pyrotechnic, unchanging brilliance with which I awe the peasants, but there is no solidity, no basic texture, hence no capacity for creative growth.

John D. MacDonald