Quotes About Growth

Only through imitation do we develop toward originality.

Y cuando aquella cosecha crecía y luego se segaba, ningún hombre había desmigajado un terrón caliente con sus manos, dejando la tierra cribarse entre las puntas de los dedos; ninguno había palpado la semilla ni anhelado que ésta germinase.

wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.

Can you imagine? said Adam. 'He'll know so many new things. I wonder if he'll talk different. You know, Lee, in the East a boy takes on the speech of his school. You can tell a Harvard man from a Princeton man. At least that's what they say.' 'I'll listen,' said Lee. 'I wonder what dialect they speak at Stanford.

Tell 'em ya dong's growed sence you los' your eye.

My old man didn't want me to read. He said I'd desert my own people. But I read anyway.

And now you don't have to be perfect, you can be good.

live your way into the answer.1 —RAINER MARIA RILKE'S ADVICE TO A YOUNG POET

It comes to him: growth is betrayal. There is no other route. There is no arriving somewhere without leaving somewhere.

We wake at different times, and the gallantest flowers are those that bloom in the cold.

We shed skins in life, to keep living.

Thirty-six years old and he knows less than when he started. With the difference that now he knows how little he'll always know.

And there was, in those Ipswich years, for me at least, a raw educational component; though I used to score well in academic tests, I seemed to know very little of how the world worked and was truly grateful for instruction, whether it was how to stroke a backhand, mix a martini, use a wallpaper steamer, or do the Twist. My wife, too, seemed willing to learn. Old as we must have looked to our children, we were still taking lessons, in how to be grown-up.

Life is a hill that gets steeper the more you climb.

You are all of twenty and very much feeling your womanhood. The strange thing about womanhood is that it goes on and on--the same daily burden of constant vague expectation and of everything being just slightly disappointing compared with what one knows one has inside oneself waiting to be touched off. It's rather like being a set of pretty little logs that won't quite catch fire, isn't it?

Geography! That's something they teach in the third grade! I never heard of a grownup studying geography.

Weeds don't know they're weeds.

But it was my way of becoming a human being, and part of being human is being on the verge of disgrace.

He sounds to himself, saying this, like an impersonator; life, just as we first thought, is playing grownup.

Nature leads you up like a mother and as soon as she gets her little contribution leaves you with nothing.

Of plants tomatoes seemed the most human, eager and fragile and prone to rot.

Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.

Our inner self learns from the things that our outer self suffers, and though it appears devastating to the outer self, the inner self lives on forever with the wisdom gained.

Change your present perspective and change what you think and do, and you can change your future. You are not a slave to your past. Your present situation may be the result of the decisions you made in your past, but your future will be the result of the decisions you make now.