“Out of your vulnerabilities will come your strength.”
“Often, it’s not about becoming a new person, but becoming the person you were meant to be, and already are, but don’t know how to be.”
“I will come back to you, I swear I will; And you will know me still. I shall be only a little taller Than when I went.”
“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
“A single day is enough to make us a little larger or, another time, a little smaller.”
“Everyone wants to live on top of the mountain, but all the happiness and growth occurs while you re climbing it.”
“Honest investigation can result only in growth.”
“We long for things that harm us and run from the things that grow and heal us. We think good is bad and bad is good.”
“I have no right to call myself one who knows. I was one who seeks, and I still am, but I no longer seek in the stars or in books; I m beginning to hear the teachings of my blood pulsing within me. My story isn t pleasant, it s not sweet and harmonious like the invented stories; it tastes of folly and bewilderment, of madness and dream, like the life of all people who no longer want to lie to themselves.”
“The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value. I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress and grow.”
“Grown up, and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.”
“This life therefore is not righteousness, but growth in righteousness, not health, but healing, not being but becoming, not rest but exercise. We are not yet what we shall be, but we are growing toward it, the process is not yet finished, but it is going on, this is not the end, but it is the road. All does not yet gleam in glory, but all is being purified.”
“My scars remind me that I did indeed survive my deepest wounds. That in itself is an accomplishment. And they bring to mind something else, too. They remind me that the damage life has inflicted on me has, in many places, left me stronger and more resilient. What hurt me in the past has actually made me better equipped to face the present.”
“I imagined the lies the valedictorian was telling them right now. About the exciting future that lies ahead. I wish she d tell them the truth: Half of you have gone as far in life as you re ever going to. Look around. It s all downhill from here. The rest of us will go a bit further, a steady job, a trip to Hawaii, or a move to Phoenix, Arizona, but out of fifteen hundred how many will do anything truly worthwhile, write a play, paint a painting that will hang in a gallery, find a cure for herpes? Two of us, maybe three? And how many will find true love? About the same. And enlightenment? Maybe one. The rest of us will make compromises, find excuses, someone or something to blame, and hold that over our hearts like a pendant on a chain.”
“When life is sweet, say thank you and celebrate. And when life is bitter, say thank you and grow.”
“In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.”
“If you are irritated by every rub, how will your mirror be polished??”