Quotes About Growth

The seminal journey of the forties is from "everyone hates me" to "they don't really care.

Newborns typically can't connect sleep cycles on their own. But from about two or three months they usually can, if given a chance to learn how.

The de'clic (DEH-kleek) is an aha moment when a child figures out how to do something important on his own...it's a welcome sign of maturity and autonomy.

book ends with the protagonist having the same problem

THE FRENCH HAVE a saying: 'You can't go faster than the music'. They believe that a child will roll over, rise to his feet, become potty trained and start to talk when he's good and ready. Lovingly encourage and support him – don't try to rush his development or turn his childhood into boot camp. Being a little kid shouldn't be hard work. There's time enough for that later.

Letting children "live their lives" isn't about releasing them into the wild or abandoning them (though French school trips do feel a bit like that to me). It's about acknowledging that children aren't repositories for their parents' ambitions or projects for their parents to perfect. They are separate and capable, with their own tastes, pleasures, and experiences of the world. They even have their own secrets.

Though I'm winging it, I've realized that everyone else is, too. Parenting starts out as a concrete project. You're full of ideas about how to shape your children. But you end up with this jellyfish of a family that you can't control exactly. All you can do is warm the waters and nudge it in the right direction.

There are stages of becoming a grown-up. First, you definitely aren't one. Then you pretend to be one. Then you're sure that there are no grown -ups; that they're mythological and don't really exist. And then finally, maybe one day in your forties, you just are one.

There are no grown-ups. Everyone is winging it; some just do it more confidently.

Siblings are the people we practice on, the people who teach us about fairness and cooperation and kindness and caring — quite often the hard way.

?hat's when I found faith, when my young'uns growed up and I had to let them go.

They say sweethearts and squabbles are like flowers and rain. Takes both to make it springtime.

When couples come together, it's for big reasons. Sometimes more than they believe. And the person who is right for you is exactly the one that makes you become who heaven intended you to be.

Without any intent, she'd managed to turn a wonderful, sweet guy like Eli into the same kind of creep she always ended up with. She'd thought she had changed. That she had grown. That falling for him was somehow evidence of that, but she had been wrong. It was exactly the same pattern. She had fallen in love with him and now he was going to treat her like crap.

Yes, Eli was gorgeous and sexy and she was still in love with him. That made her vulnerable. But being vulnerable was not the same as being defenseless. She was learning to be strong, she was learning not to settle for less than the kind of love she knew was out there, somewhere.

Jesse swallowed and looked around the field. Roe could see him struggling with his thoughts, trying to put them in a coherent order. "It takes me a long time to learn things," he told Roe finally. "When I learn 'em, I try to hold on real tight. It's kindy scary for me to try to unlearn 'em.

This is every reader's catch-22: the more you read, the more you realize you haven't read; the more you yearn to read more, the more you understand that you have, in fact, read nothing. There is no way to finish, and perhaps that shouldn't be the goal.

I went from escaping into books to extracting things from them, from being inspired by books to trying to do things that inspired me—many of which I first encountered in stories. I went from wishing I were like a character in books to being a character in my books. I went from reading books to wrestling with them to writing them, all the while still learning from what I read. The

by setting out purposefully to raise a reader—you're helping her become someone who controls her own destiny.

A minute spent reading to your kids now will repay itself a million-fold later," the author George Saunders

Books are how cautious kids get to experience a kind of secondhand rebellion, a safe way to go off the rails.

Most of us fear that in growing old, we'll become a shell of ourselves. But, of course, it's the youthful versions of ourselves that are our shells; we must leave them behind like a snakeskin. We must grow out of ourselves to grow beyond our old limits, or else risk being suffocated by the sediment of our own history.

I now believe in growing old gratefully, not gracefully. I haven't found the secret to life, or love, or eternal youth. But I do know now that youth is not the blossom but the bud, and that though one cannot always be young and wild, if you are willing to learn, to grow, to outrun the mileposts of your own wildest dreams, you can always be winsome and lucky, lovely and free.

Making peace with my past was the first step; being grateful for it was the second. Now, at last, I can appreciate the woman those experiences created: me.