Quotes About Growth

Life, too, is like that. You live it forward, but understand it backward." from CUTTING FOR STONE

People change, you know. When you leave your country, you are like a plant taken out of soil. Some people turn hard, they can't flower again.

Ignorance was just as dynamic as knowledge, and it grew in the same proportion

Ammachi, when I come to the end of a book and I look up, just four days have passed. But in that time I've lived through three generations and learned more about the world and about myself than I do during a year in school. Ahab, Queequeg, Ophelia, and other characters die on the page so that we might live better lives.

just as she kept her thoughts to herself, I was learning to do the same. This was what growing up was about: hide the corpse, don't bare your heart, do make assumptions about the motives of others. They're certainly doing all these things to you. I

The chemachen who comes calling for a subscription one morning is no more than a boy, the growth on his upper lip so sparse that each hair could be named after an apostle.

first, like a hornet's nest, it's no more than a fleck of mud in a wooden joist. But it grows, and portholes appear, and soon a steady drone can be heard within.

more in your future mate than the evidence has already suggested.

the growth on his upper lip so sparse that each hair could be named after an apostle.

Knowledge is the life of the mind.

Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.' " "I figured you'd be in.

Look, we are not unspectacular things. We've come this far, survived this much. What would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?

dearest, can you tell, I am trying to love you less.

Even now, I don't know much about happiness. I still worry and want an endless stream of more, but some days I can see the point in growing something, even if it's just to say I cared enough.

I loved them: my own bright dead things. I'm thirty-five and remember all that I've done wrong. Yesterday I was nice, but in truth I resented the contentment of the field. Why must we practice this surrender? What I mean is: there are days I still want to kill the carrots because I can.

Mostly, I enjoy my failings. Until I don't.

It wasn't until later, when I moved in with him and stood outside on our patchy imperfect lawn, that I remembered what had been circling in me: I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying.

I'm thirty-five and remember all that I've done wrong.

On increasingly warm nice days I liked to sit toward noon on the bench encircling the cherry tree and look at the bare trees, the freshly plowed fields, the green strips of winter planting, the meadows that were already sprouting, and through the fragrance which swells out of the ground with the advent of spring contemplate the mountains, gleaming with the colossal quantities of snow still on them.

While they were speaking of - in their opinion - great things, around about them only little things - also in their opinion - were happening: everywhere the bushes were turning green, the brooding earth was germinating and beginning to play with her first little Spring creatures, as one might with jewels.

The problem with loneliness is that, unlike other forms of human suffering, it teaches us nothing, leads us nowhere, and generally devalues us in our own eyes and the eyes of others.

I scuttled without a shell, between houses and wives, a snake between skins, a monster of selfishness, my grotesque needs naked and pink.

He wanted to break me, the me I'd made, the me I'd needed to make, my need, mine, my whole life since I could remember. I didn't want to hear him that night. When I was ready to change I'd change. When life opens up before you, when you don't really know death ... it's easy to promise yourself change. Keeping the lines hard, the parts of me separate, was what I knew, how I lived.

Any time you end a relationship, and everyone has ended plenty in their life, it's always a tough thing and hard to get over.