Quotes About Growth

Here below to live is to change and to be perfect is to have changed often.

En un mundo superior puede ser de otra manera, pero aquí abajo, vivir es cambiar y ser perfecto es haber cambiado muchas veces.

To live is to change, and if you have lived long, you have changed often.

The Via Media has slept in libraries; it is a substitute of infancy for manhood.

In a higher world it is otherwise; but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often. I

I wish she were alive, but I am grateful for her death. If she were alive, I would likely still be working at the literary agency. For how much longer in my life would I have believed there was time for everything? And by the time I faced my own mortality at the Bookmill in western Massachusetts, how much less would I have done? Her leaving taught me about the worst sadness, one we all must face eventually. I feel lucky I am better equipped to help others who are going through it now.

There are transitions in life whether we want them or not. You get older. You lose jobs and loves and people. The story of your life may change dramatically, tragically, or so quietly you don't even notice. It's never any fun, but it can't be avoided. Sometimes you just have to walk into the cold dark water of the unfamiliar and suffer for a while.

When you live in New York or any big city, it is easy to fail at growing up. The city is designed to keep you in a state of perpetual adolescence.

All men, I think, wonder who the secret man that lives inside them is and whom they will meet in the mirror when they stop shaving. They wonder if that man is better than the one they know. If that elder sage or fantasy wizard or feral mountain man will be wiser than they, and when they are lost, if that dude will light up his staff and guide them through the dwarven mines and out of the wilderness.

Those who say 'you only live once' have never read a book.

You don't spell it, son. You eat it.

Human beings are remarkable - at what we can learn to live with. If we couldn't get strong from what we lose, and what we miss, and what we want and can't have, then we couldn't ever get strong enough, could we? What else makes us strong?

Half my life is an act of revision.

It's a no-win argument - that business of what we're born with and what our environment does to us. And it's a boring argument, because it simplifies the mysteries that attend both our birth and our growth.

If we couldn't get strong from what we lose, and what we miss, and what we want and can't have, then we couldn't ever get strong enough.

Being wrong about important things is exhausting.

I think about you more and more, but I don't waste my time - or yours - thinking about who you were before I knew you.

You cannot drive with your eyes in the rear-view mirror… But dignity is difficult to maintain. Stamina requires constant upkeep. Repetition is boring. And you pay for grace.

Most places we leave in childhood grow less, not more, fancy.

You can learn a lot from your lovers, but-for the most part-you get to keep your friends longer, and you learn more from them.

Ambition robs you of your childhood. The moment you want to become an adult—in any way—something in your childhood dies.

There comes a moment in every life when you must let go with your hands—with both hands.

It is exhausting to be seventeen and not know who you are.

Almost everyone is dying to leave home, eventually; and almost everyone needs to.