Quotes About Growth

Shoes are the first adult machines we are given to master.

Oh, you can't hate people forever, can you? Sooner or later it always becomes clear that however awful they were to you, they were still trying to do their best. Nobody sets out to be awful, do they? But we're all this collection of traumas and hurts and dysfunctional mumbo-jumbo trying to be functional and logical and wise.

client once said that it was like a bottle full of pain, if you can imagine that. And each time you let yourself remember, each time you let yourself feel the pain, each time you cry, you empty the bottle a little bit. So it becomes easier to carry.

We get so set in our ways, you know? I mean, when you meet someone in your teens, like you two did, well, you're still growing, aren't you? You automatically adjust so that you fit together. But when you're my age, all the likes and dislikes are set in stone. That's the trouble.

Even now, I struggle to convince myself that I'm a fully grown adult, doing fully adult things. I'm not sure the ageing, wrinkled exterior ever quite convinces the innocent inner child that this is the real deal, that this is what's really happening.

Like, even if something dramatic or terrible in your life doesn't happen, just the act of growing older is like a massive trauma anyway.

the buildings of the city blossoming and withering like flowers from the swamps of Edo

One of the most important things that I did to turn my life around was to realize and to accept that from this minute, that's all we have. Everything that happened behind us we cannot change so you might as well look to the future.

Non c'è confine tra quel che siamo e quel che dovremmo essere. Siamo solo quel che possiamo essere.

Vulnerability is essential to spiritual and creative growth. Finding enormous strength through vulnerability. You're being open to whatever happens, including failure and shame. The two are connected, maybe - vulnerability and freedom.

You somehow grow into the fullness of your humanity, form your own character, become a proper person – I don't know, someone who has become a part of things, not someone separated from or at odds with the world.

You've got to understand your limitations. It's your limitations that make you the wonderful disaster you most probably are.

I say this as a young dad seeing children going into primary school: I don't think we should underestimate the formative effect on a child of those first years in primary school.

We start out knowing all the answers, and in the end we realize how little we know. Just the important things. And by that time… no one listens anymore. Hang

My journey was like the one in the book. That is the thing about books. You take their journeys with you. You came home with something more than just the remains of a fish. The book was never about the fish.

The more I read, the more I learn, the more I discover that I know nothing.

In my experience, whatever happens clings to us like barnacles on the hull of a ship, slowing us slightly, both uglifying and giving us texture. You can scrape all you want, you can, if you have money, hire someone else to scrape, but the barnacles will come back or at least leave a blemish on the steel.

I'm fast becoming the one who leaves things behind

inside us, a flower taken whole, a field built inside.

What I was trying to say, maybe, is that I don't know what it is I'm capable of transforming into.

Hard is trying to rebuild yourself, piece by piece, with no instruction book, and no clue as to where all the important bits are supposed to go.

Over the last couple of years, the photos of me when I was a kid... well, they've started to give me a little pang or something - not unhappiness, exactly, but some kind of quiet, deep regret... I keep wanting to apologize to the little guy: "I'm sorry, I've let you down. I was the person who was supposed to look after you, but I blew it: I made wrong decisions at bad times, and I turned you into me.

I believe, do you know, we never stop being what we were, young. We don't shed the young self, we just put on other skins, one cover after another, but somewhere in us is still the self we were before we fell, before we started covering ourselves. And all the rest of our lives, we're trying to go back, we're looking for it, what we lost.

Pain helps us grow stronger.