Quotes About Growth

What I would have to do later, starting in college and in the years following, to become a person of inner consequence: break that fawning inner self into pieces.

There are days when I still want to dismantle this constructed self of mine. You did it so badly, I think. You lost so much time. And then I tell myself, so what? So what? Go on.

Now you are in the true world, and a great deal more is required of you. Here you must befriend real wolves, and lure real birds down from the sky. Here you must endure real people around you, and we are not uniformly kind; we are damaged and impulsive, each in our own way. It is harder. It is not safe. But it is what you were born to.

The earth's lungs, coated in green ooze and thaw, breathed out blossom-scent and sour rot and fungus-must, wet and warm and aware, where before the air had been cold and blind, remote as the moon.

With her heels kicking the stone's side high above the ground, Branza was a girl again, though she was full-grown long ago; though the years had accumulated behind her in their great pointless pile.

Love is never easy or guaranteed. Real love is a leap, you know. As you get older, you learn how hard it is, how hard everything is, how we never know if there's ground beneath our feet, or if we'll be hurt or heartbroken. But we leap anyway. You have to take that leap.

All along, he'd been looking in the wrong direction, trying to make time stand still, to re-create the past, but everything in life taught the opposite.

Failure leads to Success.

Mistakes are expected, respected, and investigated

I'm most interested in working and learning from different people and telling good stories.

He is but as the stubble of the field, and yet he has no beard.

The true birthplace is that wherein for the first time one looks intelligently upon oneself; my first homelands have been books, and to a lesser degree schools.

Nothing is slower than the true birth of a man.

There are books which one should not attempt before having passed the age of forty.

I want you to beat down the me in me that can't coexist with me.

Older people are wise not only because they have lived longer. They're wise because they have lost more.

We routinely replace damanged parts of ourselves with new ones that are, arguably, more resilient, more able to handle challenges. As long as we avoid the trap of growing our skin so thick that nothing gets through, getting bruised can only boost our ability to cope with whatever life throws at us.

From this perspective, creativity is a means of diffusing and managing loss, of transforming it into something that we can tolerate and live through, and, in the long run, perhaps even use as a basis for new life.

It is, in other words, in part through painful processes of loss and separation that we arrive at a sense of who we are. Such processes function as "boundary-creating" experiences that build singular and (more or less) self-sufficient psyches.

One way to understand the matter is to recognize that when we mourn, we not only grieve the vanishing of treasured objects, but also those versions of ourselves that thrived within a particular (now lost) relational dynamic. In this manner, loss compels us to discard outmoded facets of the self. While this may give rise to bouts of regret and nostalgia, in the final analysis it serves to replenish the self in that it engenders new inner intensities and unforeseen psychic possibilities.

On this view, our identities acquire depth and vitality not from any innate kernel of being, but from a gradual layering of stories. This in turn implies that the most current story that we tell about ourselves is merely the most recent draft of our life.

Let us cry for the spilt milk , by all means, if by doing so we learn how to avoid spilling any more. Let us cry for the spilt milk , and remember how, and where, and why, we spilt it. Much wisdom is learnt through tears, but none by forgetting our lessons.

And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far into the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. RAINER MARIA RILKE , Letters to a Young Poet

Some days I'm just sixteen, and sixteen isn't what I want to be.