Quotes About Growth

I find that the older I get, the more I see that there really aren't huge zeniths of happiness or a huge abyss of darkness as much as there used to be.

It's not easy being so frightened of everything. And when I think of how much I've improved in the last year, I wonder when I'll ever get finished with making changes and be really grown up.

Soon you will be going on a new journey and beginning a new life.

It's just about impossible to be perfect all the time. In fact, some days it's hard to do anything right. But sometimes things go really well. There are a lot of new things to learn, a lot of new rules and regulations.

People narrow to their choices said the other woman. That's not the same as changing.

In the end you learned to live with things once you stopped talking about them.

When you read to a child, when you put a book in a child's hands, you are bringing that child news of the infinitely varied nature of life. You are an awakener.

A good novel begins with a small question and ends with a bigger one.

Imagination is conjunctive and unifying; the sour, habitual wars of the self are disjunctive and separating. When I begin a story at my desk, the window to my back, the path is not there. As I start to walk, I make the path.

When your children were small you worried that they would die and you would lose them, and then they grew up and you ended up losing the children they'd been, anyway.

the development of a humble heart. In Lent, we are invited to look deeply inside, identify what is impeding our ability to follow Christ along the path of humility, and begin applying antidotes. Early church tradition is rich in the

Things come that we never would have predicted for ourselves or even guessed at. And yet they change us for ever.

Denys understood how nothing ever holds still for us, or should. The trick is learning to take things as they come and fully, too, with no resistance or fear, not trying to grip them too tightly or make them bend.

Proper learning isn't just useful in society, Beryl. It can be wonderfully yours, a thing to have and keep just for you.

Miwanzo is the word in Swahili for "beginnings." But sometimes everything has to end first and the bottom drop out and every light fizzle and die before a proper beginning can come along.

The first time I saw a narcissus pushing through ice and thriving, I thought it was perfect and wanted that kind of determination for myself.

We're all of us afraid of many things, but if you make yourself smaller or let your fear confine you, then you really aren't your own person at all—are you? The real question is whether or not you will risk what it takes to be happy." She was referring to Jock, but her words made me think of other things, too. "Are you happy, Karen?" "Not yet. But I mean to be.

He talks about the gift of being lost in the woods. I've always found that comforting, somehow. That maybe you have to be truly lost before you can find yourself again.

It's not what you carry, but how you can learn to carry it. You need to heal yourself. Your child self too, Anna. Make room for her. Find a way to let her in.

I've sometimes thought that being loved a little less than others can actually make a person, rather than ruin them.

Whatever they were, they were living their lives, out there doing it, making their mistakes. Somehow I'd gotten stuck along the way […] and I didn't know how to free myself exactly.

Getting your heart broken is the privilege of being human, Eden used to say. I didn't know what she meant then. My heart had been broken lots of times, and I was supposed to say thank you? Now, all these years later, I'm at least starting to see that she was really talking about the whole journey. That it's impossible to be alive and not get hurt sometimes, not if you're doing it right.

Beginning are important, too, darling. You should be patient with life.

What are you thinking? Just of how much you've changed me. This is why there is poetry. For days like these.