Quotes about Personal Growth

It does not matter who forgives you, if you're the one who can't forget.

It turns out that sharing the past with someone is different from reliving it when you're alone. It feels less like a wound, more like a poultice. Two

I think half the battle is figuring out what works for you

there were things I knew for sure: That I had been loved, once, and had loved back. That a person could find hope in the way a weed grew. That the sum of a man's life was not where he wound up but in the details that brought him there. That we made mistakes.

But I'm even more cautious with the white ones in the pickup trucks with Confederate flags hanging in the back windows. Because I used to be who they are, and I know what they are capable of.

If you don't want someone to change your life for you, you've got to change it yourself.

I wondered how two boys - like Shay and me - could begin at the same point and somehow take turns that would lead us to be such a different men.

but I love the fact that it needs to sit quietly, to retreat from touch and noise and drama, in order to evolve. I have to admit, I often feel that way myself.  Ã¢â'¬Â¢

Madeline decides Jonathan is an immature, selfish asshole and that she is never talking to him again.

Listen, I'm going to give you some advice, not because I think you need it, but because I feel like I've earned it. The right, I mean. To give advice. Here it is: don't hold onto things. It's a problem the men in my family have. It's taken me a long time to figure this out. Me, my father, my grandfather, we collect things. We collect miseries. It's what we do. But sometimes the best thing to do is to just let things go. To let them pass.

It turns out loving yourself is the greatest way to improve yourself. And as you improve yourself, you improve your world.

My best friend is the one who builds my character and improves my life.

Friendship is a life we live; not an office we occupy.

Every friend loves to change for the best; but few really do.

Real friends change because they want to; not because you want them to.

Writing is, among things, the place where we can help ourselves cope with the dark parts of our living

The world's first task, as I knew well, a task it never relaxed from, was to undo me. I was even afraid of the sky.

no man with any sense should marry the girl to whom he loses his virginity. It's like learning to drive in some clapped-out old banger and then holding on to it for the rest of your life when you've developed the skill to handle a BMW in rush-hour traffic on a busy Autobahn.

That's good to hear. There's nothing more tedious than a grown man blaming his parents, birth or otherwise, for all the things that have gone wrong in his life.

It is impossible to be intimate if you have no sense of self. How can you share yourself with another if you do not really know who you are? How can anyone know you if you do not know who you really are? One way a person builds a strong sense of self is by developing strong boundaries

Until this original pain is embraced and worked through, the person cannot recover from the effects of the violation. Without doing their original pain grieving, they cannot find and reclaim their wonder child.

Success is different at different stages of development—from not wetting your pants in infancy, to being well liked in childhood and adolescence, to getting laid in young adulthood, to making money and having prestige in later adulthood, to getting laid in middle age, to being well liked in old age, to not wetting your pants in senility." What's

When we are shame-based, we can only focus on our own ache.

Reframing my life with my wonder child helped me to see that everything in my childhood prepared me for what I'm doing now. The purpose I found in my meditation was that I am here to be myself and to proclaim my human freedom and to help others do the same.