Quotes About Growth

When you take the small roads you see the life that goes on there, and this makes your own life larger.

Everybody makes mistakes, sometimes even before we get up in the morning. We can't help but make mistakes. The important thing is to keep trying. And to apologize when you need to.

Well, I've said it often enough to others: there are times when you have to hurt badly in order to move. Otherwise, you'll stay in a place you've outgrown.

No one could ever be for me what [he] had been because he had known me when, and that had kept me away from the true reality of my years.

Oh just wait. It takes a lot of time, that's all...You'll have come to a certain kind of appreciation that moves beyond all the definitions of love you've ever had. A certain richness happens only later in life. I guess its' a kind of mellowing. p 80 talking about marriage and husbands

aging means the abandonment of criticism and the taking on of compassionate acceptance.

And she finally told Nola that she was so worried about whether she could love two children, about whether she could make room in her heart for as much love as she felt for Bobby. Wasn't it betraying Bobby, to love another child? And Nola told her what her sister Patricia had said, after having her second. Patricia said she felt like she'd grown a second heart.

My mother lost too much and repaired herself in the only way she was able to repair herself. That in fact she is repairing herself, hour by hour.

For all that we might be, if only we'd let ourselves.

For everything there truly is a season; if his life's work has not taught him that, it has taught him nothing. The birth of spring, the fullness of summer, the push of glory in the fall, the quiet of winter.

Healing hurts, but hurting heals.

This is the way things work sometimes, that good things get ideas from each other, say, well now let's go ahead and let her have it all.

This is life, uh? We lose something here; we get something there. The trick is to stop looking in the old place to find the new thing.

It's good for you to be a bit uncomfortable from time to time, especially if you're only a few steps away from relief. People forget about the value of adversity.

I think love is all about risk. And reinvention. And honesty and revelation. And if you don't have that in a relationship, you don't grow, and you don't stay true to what you started together.

What does anyone say to anybody who used to be so important in her life, whom she's not seen in such a long time? It seems to me that in situations like this, we're all wondering the same thing: I'm still me; are you still you? A

This is not a novel about a woman leaving home, but rather a human being finding her way back.

There's always hope when a kid—or an adult, for that matter—likes to read.

Already I've seen that when you're pulled away from your normal routine, it's as though air and sunlight come into your brain and do a little housecleaning.

We catch what we can. We walk past what we lose for the promise of more, just ahead.

Well, I was just going to say that it seems one of the things you have to do in order to finally grow up is to let that what-my-parents-did-to-me stuff go.

Divorce is a series of internal earthquakes, that's what it is, one after the other.

Life has its way, and it seems to me now that the object might only be to learn how to be graceful, to understand the value of a deep kind of acceptance.

That's what life is, at its best. A confession club: people admitting to doubts and fears and failures. That's what brings us closer to one another, our imperfections.