Quotes About Growth

If living is to progress, if you are lucky, from foolishness to wisdom, then to write novels is to broadcast the various stages of your foolishness.

we all get humiliated at some point or another during our lives. the trick is not to let it make you resentful or defeatist.

We've all done things we wish we hadn't, made choices we didn't even know were choices at that time. but that doesn't mean we have to stick by them. In life, you find out who you are gradually, not all at once. You made a bad choice, okay? But you can still get out of it.

There is no point in dwelling on dashed hopes or what might have been. I knew I had to clear my mind, learn from my mistakes, make peace with fate's little merry pranks, and forge ahead. The great truth of poker—and of life—can be summed up in two words: "Next hand.

If the cup is empty, it can be filled.

Mother Land provides evidence that growth in self-understanding can be achieved at a late stage of life -- Theroux is in his seventies -- evidence that the story is not over yet and that new insight and change can take place until the end.

The Chinese say that there is no scenery in your home town. They're right. Being in another place heightens the senses, allows you to see more, enjoy more, take delight in small things; it makes life richer. You feel more alive, less cocooned.

Seeing human suffering changes you. It either makes you compassionate or it makes you hard.

A traveller with an open mind grows richer with each journey, with each encounter, with each conversation.

Major Chhetri's pronouncement when we'd first arrived in Nepal came echoing back: "Things that start in the rain end well.

On life's journey, every person met, every place, every new word, language, scent & sound changes the traveller a little: forms who they are and whom they become

How often is the passing of one storm only a prelude to another.

Someone can always take your money or belongings from you, but no one can ever steal your education.

Twenty-five years had whisked by with its challenges and triumphs. Ida now had a medical school, a nursing school, and a large hospital, but still there was much more to be done. Ida found herself wondering what her next challenge would be.

Janet Buttolph Johnson

In no order of things is adolescence the time of simple life.

I make lots of mistakes. I try hard not to make the same mistake more than three or four times.

I need to look like an idiot at least twice a day to keep myself humble.

You've got to let go of who you were, to become who you will be.

Whenever she turned her steep focus to me, I felt the warmth that flowers must feel when they bloom through the snow, under the first concentrated rays of the sun.

And when I shed my old skin, what soft and tender flesh did I expose?

The day is early with birds beginning and the wren in a cloud piping like the child in the poem, drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe. And the place grows bean flower, pea-green lush of grass, swarm of insects dizzily hitting the high spots; dunny rosette creeping covering shawl ream in a knitted cosy of roses; ah the tipsy wee small hours of insects that jive upon the crippled grass blades and the face of the first flower alive.

It is my trade," he said. "I work for the bean family, and every day there are deaths among the beans, mostly from thirst. They shrivel and die, they go blind in their one black eye, and I put them in one of these tiny coffins. Beans, you know, are beautifully shaped, like a new church, like modern architecture, like a planned city

And so passed one morning and every morning and day but the people growing gentle and together, like old bulbs without promise of bloom, thrown to the rubbish heap and sinking in the filth and blindness to sprout a seperate community of dark, touching tendril and root to yet invisible colour of maimed flowers, narcissus, daffodil, tulip, and crocus-leaf stained with blade of snow.