Quotes About Growth

What we must remember above all in the education of our children is that their love of life should never weaken.

Ma non si amano soltanto le memorie felici. A un certo punto della vita, ci si accorge che si amano le memorie.

But to look back all the time is boring. Excitement lies in tomorrow.

estrogen spurs the growth of many cell types—mammal, insect, grain.

As youth flowers into maturity, the barrier between nerd and herd grows taller and thicker and begins to sprout thorns.

Open the ovoid mother and find the ovoid girl; open the child and the next egg grins up its invitation to crack it. You can never tell a priori how many iterations await you; you hope they continue forever. My daughter, my matryoshka.

Everything's a wheel, turning and turning, never stopping. The frogs is part of it, and the bugs, and the fish, and the wood thrush, too. And people. But never the same ones. Always coming in new, always growing and changing, and always moving on. That's the way it's supposed to be. That's the way it is.

Even when bad things happen you have to try to use those bad things in a positive manner and really just take the positive out of it.

Sometimes when you think you are done, it is just the edge of beginning. Probably that's why we decide we're done. It's getting too scary. We are touching down onto something real. It is beyond the point when you think you are done that often something strong comes out.

We have to accept ourselves in order to write. Now none of us does that fully: few of us do it even halfway. Don't wait for one hundred percent acceptance of yourself before you write, or even eight percent acceptance. Just write. The process of writing is an activity that teaches us about acceptance.

It's pretty nice to be talented. If you are, enjoy, but it won't take you that far. Work takes you a lot further.

the artist and the alcoholic have parallel paths. They both go into the darkness, but the alcoholic gets stuck there. The artist (if she is not also addicted) goes into the darkness and is transformed by the experience and comes out more alive.

Of course, we are drawn to teachers who unconsciously mirror our own psychology. None of us are clean. We all make mistakes. It's the repetition of those mistakes and the refusal to look at them that compound the suffering and assure their continuation.

We must continue to open in the face of tremendous opposition. No one is encouraging us to open and still we must peel away the layers of the heart.

We never graduate from first grade. Over and over, we have to go back to the beginning. We should not be ashamed of this. It is good. It's like drinking water; we don't drink a glass once and never have to drink one again. We don't finish one poem or novel and never have to write one again. Over and over, we begin. This is good. This is kindness. We don't forget our roots.

There is no failure—just a big field to wander in.

Real, solid growth and education are slow. Look at a tree. We don't put a seed in the ground and then stick our fingers in the earth and yank up an oak. Everything has its time and is nourished and fed with the rhythms of the sun and moon, the seasons. We are no different, no more special, no less important. We belong on the earth. We grow in the same way as a rock, a snail, a porpoise, or a blade of grass. America has forgotten this.

Relax as you read and absorb it, as by osmosis, with your whole body and mind. And don't just read it. Write. Trust yourself. Learn your own needs. Use this book.

After you have finished a piece of work, the work is then none of your business. Go on and do something else.

When you fail you learn from the mistakes you made and it motivates you to work even harder.

The success of Torn was a bit too much for me. I took a year off and was still scared to start the second album.

Divorce was very sad, obviously, but now I've gotten over it.

I don't love studying. I hate studying. I like learning. Learning is beautiful.

I might have been made of metal once, but not anymore. Like Pinocchio, I'd turned into a real girl. So far it sucked. But there was nothing I could do about it.