Quotes About Growth

Obviously, it's a huge deal when your little girl starts to turn into a woman, but the change has a gentle fluidity, so it seems to happen like time-lapse photography of a flower blooming.

Want wisdom? Laugh at yourself.

Most people are only doing the best that they know how to do.Blaming and holding grudges only brings more pain.

Learning and sex until rigor mortis.

What I know: when I met you, a blue rush began. I want you to know, I no longer hold you responsible.

This slice of truth, offered in the final hour, ended up beginning a new chapter of my adulthood, the one in which I realized that age doesn't necessarily bring anything with it, save itself. The rest is optional.

The mother of an adult child sees her work completed and undone at the same time.' If this holds true, I may have to withstand not only rage, but also my undoing. Can one prepare for one's undoing? How has my mother withstood mine? Why do I continue to undo her, when what I want to express above all else is that I lover her very much?

As it turned out, my fears were unwarranted. Which isn't to say you haven't changed. But the biggest change of all has been a measure of peace. The peace is not total, but in the face of a suffocating anxiety, a measure of peace is no small thing.

I invent her, then, as a woman emerging from the sea. A tall man meets here on the black sand. You've come back, he says. Can barely see her in the sea-light. They make love there, and become horses. As night grows black they become weeds

There is simply no way that a year from now you're going to feel the way you feel today", a different therapist said to me last year at this time. But though I have learned to act as if I feel differently, the truth is that my feelings haven't really changed.

100. It often happens that we count our days, as if the act of measurement made us some kind of promise. But really this is like hoisting a harness onto an invisible horse. "There is simply no way that a year from now you're going to feel the way you feel today," a different therapist said to me last year at this time. But though I have learned to act as if I feel differently, the truth is that my feelings haven't really changed.

You're the only one who knows when you're using things to protect yourself and keep your ego together and when you're opening and letting things fall apart, letting the world come as it is—working with it rather than struggling against it. You're the only one who knows. And the thing is, even you don't always know.

This slice of truth, offered in the final hour, ended up beginning a new chapter of my adulthood, the one in which I realized that age doesn't necessarily bring anything with it, save itself. The rest is optional. Bear

Whereas an art that affects you in the moment, but which you then find hard to remember, is straining to bring you to another level. It offers images or ideas from that other level, that other way of being, which is why you find them hard to remember. But it has opened you to the possibility of growing into what you are not yet, which is exactly what art should do.

How clearly I have seen my condition, yet how childishly I have acted," says Goethe's sorrowful young Werther. "How clearly I still see it, and yet show no sign of improvement.

For it isn't just moments of happiness, which is all I thought we got. It's happiness that spreads.

We may become more used to jumping into flight, but that doesn't mean we have done with all perches.

81. What I know: when I met you, a blue rush began. I want you to know, I no longer hold you responsible.

Babies grow in a helix of hope and fear.

How clearly I have seen my condition, yet how childishly I have acted

one may have to undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the margin, return to the same themes in one's work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again—not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life.

I swam in dangerous waters, both metaphorically and literally. It was not so much that I didn't value my existence but more that I had an insatiable desire to push myself to embrace all that it could offer.

She is not yet where she needs to be, in the forest, alone, with the trees over her head. She is not alone.

What I wish I had known, age twenty-one, as I cycled away from the results board towards the meadow by the river in Cambridge, where I would throw stones into the water and cry, is that nobody ever asks you what degree you got. It ceases to matter the moment you leave university. That the things in life which don't go to plan are usually more important, more formative, in the long run, than the things that do.