Quotes about Personal Growth

Contrary to my upbringing, the bigger, more real, and friendlier the world inside me becomes, the safer I feel in the outside world.

Writing can give you what having a baby can give you: it can get you to start paying attention, can help you soften, can wake you up. But publishing won't do any of those things; you'll never get in that way.

Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself to do—the actual act of writing—turns out to be the best part. It's like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward. I

The old adage is that intimacy means "Into me I see"—deeply, with a flashlight—and believe me, we're not trying to avoid seeing the lovely and selfless aspects of ourselves. It's not even the unlikable qualities—narcissism, fraudulence, envy. It's the really disgusting, uncooked-egg parts of us—wanting people to fail, using people, holding on to resentments, our sense of entitlement.

Carl Jung said that most painful issues can't be solved—they can only be outgrown, but that takes time and deep work.

It's not a person's depth you must discover, but their ascent. Find their path from depth to ascent.

You can't just write and write and put things in a drawer. They wither without the warm sun of someone else's appreciation.

Woman must come of age by herself. She must find her true center alone.

But easy victories pall after a while. If one always wins, perhaps one is attempting only what is well within one's capabilities—and there lies a kind of death, don't you think? That which does not grow may well be showing the first signs of atrophy.

I didn't want to talk about my past, and I didn't care about his. For any of us, it's who you are today that matters.

A good book changes you,even if it is only to add a little to the furniture of your mind. It will make you laugh and perhaps cry; it should certainly make you think.

Don't let the old story repeat itself now. Arm yourself with all that's happened.

The atheism and nihilism of my earlier years now seems shallow, and even a bit cocky.

And I saw that if I were to maximize every experience available to me, I must exert my own powers over my learning.

He wasn't sure why or how, but he… cared about her. He could be the worst possible bastard, but something stopped him from being that callous, and the thought disturbed him. Was he growing soft? Becoming kind?

He thought of how it would be if his father returned some time in he future, when Cody was a man. Look at what I've accomplished, Cody would tell him. Notice where I've got to, how far I've come without you. Was it something I said? Was it something I did? Was it something I didn't do, that made you go away?

level where

Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading--that is a good life. A day that closely resembles every other day of the past ten or twenty years does not suggest itself as a good one. But who would not call Pasteur's life a good one, or Thomas Mann's?

Everyone in the world was programmed by the place they were born, hemmed in by their beliefs, but you had to at least try to grow your own brain. Otherwise, you might as well be living on a reservation, worshipping a bunch of bogus gods.

what you do, the way you think, makes you beautiful

Splitting up has not been an easy thing for either Lindsay or me," Stevie confides. "I think we both knew deep down that it was the only thing we could do. We weren't creating, either of us. . . . It's much better now.

Al día de hoy, al comprender la habilidad del mundo para presionarme hasta que haga lo que no hago, he madurado. Con qué actitud desempeño mi papel, eso depende únicamente de mi.

Let me know that into the knot of self comes the thread called time, and that what I am, disgraced or blessed, came from what I was, goes to what I yet may be.

Learning is not done to you, it is something you choose to do.