Quotes About Growth

Behind every journey is a reason

On his bedside table, between the reading lamp and the telephone, was his battered copy of David Copperfield. Homer didn't have to open the book to know how the story began. Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show, he recited from memory.

Unlike Alice, Garp was a real writer —not because he wrote more beautifully than she wrote but because he knew what every artist should know: as Garp put it, 'You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.' Even if these so-called endings and beginnings are illusions. Garp did not write faster than anyone else, or more; he simply always worked with the idea of completion in mind.

Let the grave mound grow a little grass, I always say; then it's safe to look.

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.

You are never over your childhood, not until you are under the train—unter dem Zug.

Homer Wells, listening to Big Dot Taft, felt like her voice – dulled. Wally was away, Candy was away, and the anatomy of a rabbit was, after Clara, no challenge; the migrants, whom he'd so eagerly anticipated, were just plain hard workers; life was just a job. He had grown up without noticing when? Was there nothing remarkable in the transition?

The student and the teacher had contrasting ideas about the sentence, which was: "There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.

As Garp put it, 'You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.' Even if these so-called endings and beginnings are illusions.

Importantly, it was in this out north to Steering, with the real Ellen James sleep and in his care, that T. S. Garp decided he would try to be more like his mother, Jenny Fields. A thought, it occurred to him, that would have pleased his mother greatly if it had only come to him when she was alive.

As a fourteen-year-old, he'd not been old enough to have sympathy for her—for either the child or the adult that she was.

She felt if she ever had children she would love them no less when they were twenty than when they were two; they might need you more at twenty, she thought. What do you really need when you're two? In the hospital, the babies were the easiest patients. The older they got, the more they needed; and the less anyone wanted or loved them.

We all go through a phase—it lasts a lifetime, for some of us—when we're embarrassed by our parents; we don't want them hanging around us because we're afraid they'll do or say something that will make us feel ashamed of them.

Do not forget the past; forgive the past.

If your first day of school, like your first tattoo, is a pilgrim experience—well, here was Jack's.

Jenny decided that all manifestations of her innocence were futile and appeared defensive.

for a brief phase, you were expected to absorb love (and get enough), and then, for a much longer and more serious phase, you were expected to fulfill certain obligations. When

for a brief phase, you were expected to absorb love (and get enough), and then, for a much longer and more serious phase, you were expected to fulfill certain obligations

Tobit—the one that goes, "That she and I may grow old together.

You are never over your childhood, not until

In the company of grown women among whom Jack remembered being a little boy, he was again a child.

If an orphan is not adopted by the time he reaches this alarming period of adolescence, he may continue to deceive himself, and others forever. "For a terrible time of life a teen-ager deceives himself; he believes he can trick the world. He believes he is invulnerable. An adolescent who is an orphan at this phase is in danger of never growing up.

I remember you as a little boy," she told me, not long ago, "but when I look at you now, I don't know who you are." I told her I occasionally had the same feeling about myself.

David Copperfield.