Quotes About Growth

I have a tendency not only to see the best in everyone, but to assume that everyone is emotionally capable of reaching his highest potential. I have fallen in love more times than I care to count with the highest potential of a man, rather than with the man himself, and then I have hung on to the relationship for a long time (sometimes far too long) waiting for the man to ascend to his own greatness. Many times in romance I have been a victim of my own optimism.

one of the reasons I was so free that year was because I was such a mess.

The hardest part of your life is behind you now.

Guilt's just your ego's way of tricking you into thinking that you're making moral progress.

It could take me a whole year just to finish one tiny short story. Most of the time, all I was doing was imitating my favorite authors, anyhow. I went through a Hemingway stage (who doesn't?), but I also went through a pretty serious Annie Proulx stage and a rather embarrassing Cormac McCarthy stage. But that's what you have to do at the beginning; everybody imitates before they can innovate.

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 that is holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life.

La gente cree que un alma gemela es la persona con la que encajas perfectamente, que es lo que quiere todo el mundo. Pero un alma gemela auténtica es un espejo, es la persona que te saca todo lo que tienes reprimido, que te hace volver la mirada hacia dentro para que puedas cambiar tu vida. Una verdadera alma gemela es, seguramente, la persona mas importante que vayas a conocer en tu vida, porque te tira abajo todos los muros y te despierta de un porrazo.

Nunca olvides que una vez, en el momento más inesperado, te viste a ti misma como una amiga.

Your creative work is not your baby; if anything, you are its baby. Everything I have ever written has brought me into being. Every project has matured me in a different way. I am

Stones grow. Plants grow and live. Animals grow, live, and feel").

when I was nineteen years old and an idiot

Don't rush through the experiences and circumstances that have the most capacity to transform you.

Remember that you are nothing but a beginner.

I believe that our creativity grows like sidewalk weeds out of the cracks between our pathologies—not from the pathologies themselves. But so many people think it's the other way around.

Cu cat este mai mare criza, cu atat mai rapida este evolutia.

We don't have time for perfect.

el fracaso tiene una función. Te pregunta si de verdad quieres seguir haciendo cosas».

Entonces, ¿la tristeza es un sitio? —preguntó Giovanni. —Un sitio en el que la gente a veces se pasa años —contesté.

When I get lonely these days, I think: So BE lonely, Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome the human experience. But never again use another person's body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings.

I was inspired by the example of my parents and by Walt Whitman's stirring advice to American boys of the nineteenth century: "Ascend no longer from the textbook! Ascend to your own country! Go to the West and the South! Go among men, in the spirit of men! Master horses, become a good marksman and a strong oarsman . . .

one must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation. 26 Ihad shipped ahead a box of books to myself, right before I left New York to move to Italy.

It doesn't have to be perfect, and you don't have to be Plato.

Don't fall into a funk about the one that got away. Don't beat yourself up. Don't rage at the gods above. All that is nothing but distraction, and the last thing you need is further distraction. Grieve if you must, but grieve efficiently. Better to just say good-bye to the lost idea with dignity and continue onward. Find something else to work on—anything, immediately—and get at it. Keep busy.

finally realized that my fear was boring. Mind you, my fear had always been boring to everybody else, but it wasn't until mid-adolescence that it became, at last, boring even to me. My fear became boring to me, I believe, for the same reason that fame became boring to Jack Gilbert: because it was the same thing every day.