Quotes About Growth

wonder at what point a child becomes a person. Does it happen all at once, or slowly, in stages? Is there an age, a week, a moment, at which all the secrets of the universe are revealed and adulthood descends on a cloud from heaven, altering the brain forever? Will the child-me slink off one day, never to return?

Gabriel is just a baby but eventually he will see the world and his father as they are: imperfect, dangerous, peppered with betrayals and also with love.

It was not a healthy marriage for long time. It was never about another man, it was about what my and Dennis's relationship could not sustain.

I think we can be the very best place to start a business, to grow a business, to invent a new technology, to change the world, to change the country. But we've got a lot of work to deliver a new California to the people of California.

Look at growth, look at how much time people spend on the Net and look at the variety of things that they are doing. It's all really good, so I am actually encouraged by the fundamentals that underlie usage growth on the Net.

You know, I sometimes think that the most effective people in the world are introverts who taught themselves how to be extroverts.

But clearly life took people and shook them around until finally they were unrecognizable even to those who had once known them well. Still, there was power in once having known someone.

Apparently, something can happen inside someone you love—it can just happen somehow—and like magic she thinks that she's had enough, and that the way the two of you have been for a really long time is no longer worth the effort. Does that sound familiar to anyone.

Your twenties were a time when you still felt young, but the groundwork was being laid in a serious way, crisscrossing beneath the surface. It was being laid even while you slept. What you did, where you lived, who you loved, all of it was like pieces of track being put down in the middle of the night by stealth workers.

Faith Frank hired me, originally, based on nothing. She took me in and she taught me things, and more than that she gave me permission. I think that's what the people who change our lives always do. They give us permission to be the person we secretly really long to be but maybe don't feel we're allowed to be.

Though Jonah felt transfixed inside his own childhood, no one else saw him as a child. He was already over the hump of middle age, heading rapidly toward those year that no one like to speak of. The best parts had already passed for people Jonah's age. By now you were meant to have become what you would finally be, and to gracefully and unobtrusively stay in that state for the rest of your life.

Writers need light. They always tell you this, as though they're parched, as though they're plants, as though the page they're working on would look completely different with a southern exposure.

She missed his young, vulnerable, ownable self. You never knew when you were lifting your child for the last time; it might seem like just a regular time, when it was taking place, but later, looking back, it would turn out to have been the last.

She used to be really dynamic and exciting and filled with promise, but she's become this ordinary sort of boring person...I always thought it was the saddest and most devastating ending. How you could have these enormous dreams that never get met. How without knowing it you could just make yourself smaller over time. I don't want that to happen to me.

sometimes a mindfuck was a satisfying and productive fuck after all.

But of course she liked Isadora less now, because she needed her less and saw her more clearly.

The students lurked on the edges of their teachers' lives for years, and brought bulletins from their own lives, which over time began to include lovers, ambitions, an upward trajectory.

But it's never just been the journals that have made the difference, I don't think. It's also the way the students are with one another . . . the way they talk about books and authors and themselves. Not just their problems, but their passions too. The way they form a little society and discuss whatever matters to them. Books light the fire—whether it's a book that's already written, or an empty journal that needs to be filled in.

She became who she had been meant to be

I think having the knowledge, plus the experiences you've lived through, make you definitely not fragile. They make you brave.

Marriage, I don't think, is like that. It's something else. It's a thing in which you get to see your closest friend become more of who she already is.

Sometimes you had to let go of your convictions, or at least loosen them far more than you ever thought you would.

So many people don't even know what hits them when they grow up. They feel clobbered over the head the minute the first thing goes wrong, and they spend the rest of their lives trying to avoid pain at all costs. But you all know that avoiding pain is impossible. And I think having that knowledge, plus the experiences you've lived through, make you definitely not fragile. They make you brave.

Everything you do, it'll all feel really slow for a long time. But looking back, much later, it will have seemed like it was fast.