“I m tired of my life, my clothes, the things I say. I m hacking away at the surface, as at some kind of gray ice, trying to break through to what is underneath or I am dead. I can feel the surface trembling—it seems ready to give but it never does. I am uninterested in current events. How can I justify this? How can I explain it? I don t want to have the same vocabulary I ve always had. I want something richer, broader, more penetrating and powerful.”
“Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a charlatan in place of the warm balmy nights I dream of in April. It’s a sad season of life without growth…It has no day.”
“When I speak of life and love as expanding with age, sex seems the least important thing. At any age we grow by the enlarging of consciousness, by learning a new language, or a new art or craft (gardening?) that implies a new way of looking at the universe. Love is one of the great enlargers of the person because it requires us to take in the stranger and to understand him, and to exercise restraint and tolerance as well as imagination to make the relationship work.”
“Science is only a Latin word for knowledge”
“After all, people may really have in them some vocation which is not quite plain to themselves, may they not? They may seem idle and weak because they are growing. We should be very patient with each other, I think.”
“Don t allow the pride, ego and insecurities of others stunt your growth.”
“I now see my life, not as a slow shaping of achievment to fit my preconceived purposes, but as the gradual discovery of a purpose which I did not know.”
“Jaime had never realised that trees made a sound when they grew, and no-one else had realised it either, because the sound is made over hundreds of years in waves of twenty-four hours from peak to peak. Speed it up, and the sound a tree makes is vrooom.”
“You need to be buried deep in the dirt before you can find your bloom.”
“We are all broken and wounded in this world. Some choose to grow strong at the broken places.”
“By cultivating the beautiful we scatter the seeds of heavenly flowers, as by doing good we cultivate those that belong to humanity.”
“Don’t follow someone else’s map. You should glean teachings from all directions, keeping true to those that bring progress yet remaining open to changes in yourself.”
“Home is defined very aptly as “Mother as the Foundation & Father as the Roof ”
“A person is not like a thing that you put down in one place and leave, a person moves, thinks, asks, questions, doubts, investigates, probes, and while it is true that, out of a long habit of resignation, he sooner or later ends up looking as if he has submitted to the objects, don t go thinking that this apparent submission is necessarily permanent.”
“I love the smell of rain and growing things.”
“You can grow like a tall tree, when you enjoy the sun, wind, rain, storms and the stars in the dark nights.”
“Nunca venerará adecuadamente la imagen en el altar quien primero la vio como madera en el campo.”