Quotes About Growth

The Augusteum warns me not to get attached to any obsolete ideas about who I am, what I represent, whom I belong to, or what function I may once have intended to serve.

This is what intimacy does to us over time. That's what a long marriage can do: It causes us to inherit and trade each other's stories. (p.237)

We are all just beginners here, and we shall all die beginners.

All transformation appears to be motivated by desperation and emergency.

Resist change at your own peril, Vivian. When something ends, let it end.

most marriages are neither heavenly nor hellish, but vaguely purgatorial.

If something is rubbing so hard against you, you can be sure it's working on you.

A true soul mate is probably the most important person you'll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake.

failure has a function. It asks you whether you really want to go on making things.

Whatever you do, try not to dwell too long on your failures. You don't need to conduct autopsies on your disasters.

The Augusteum warns me not to get attached to any obsolete ideas about who I am, what I represent, whom I belong to, or what function I may once have intended to serve. .. Even in the Eternal City (Rome), says the silent Augusteum, one must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation.

People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that's what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything you're holding back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you'll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake.

I watched them, thinking that little girls who make their mothers live grow up to be such powerful women.

He told me that one of the reasons people are so unhappy is they don't talk to themselves. He said you have to keep a conversation going with yourself throughout your life to see how you're doing, to keep your focus, to remain your own friend. He told me that he talked to himself all the time, and that it helped him to grow stronger and better everyday.

In all of our lives, there are days that we wish we could see expunged from the record of our very existence.

Alma came to consider her library work as a kind of indoor gardening

Elizabeth Gilbert

He endeared himself to me forever the first night we met, when I was getting frustrated with my inability to find the words I wanted in Italian, and he put his hand on my arm and said, Liz, you must be very polite with yourself when you are learning something new.

I've never seen any life transformation that didn't begin with the person in question finally getting tired of their own bullshit.

the clock is ticking, and the world is spinning, and we simply do not have time anymore to think so small.

The Silly Putty-like malleability of the institution [marriage], in fact, is the only reason we still have the thing at all. Very few people... would accept marriage on it's thirteenth-century terms. Marriage survives, in other words, precisely because it evolves. (Though I suppose this would not be a very persuasive argument to those who probably also don't believe in evolution).

When the dust has settled years later, we might ask ourselves, "What was I thinking?" and the answer is usually: You weren't. Psychologists call that state of deluded madness "narcissistic love." I call it "my twenties.

One of these poems I wrote after having been here only a month. The other, I wrote this morning. In the space between the two poems, I have found acres of grace

We must all get our hearts broken sometimes. This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something