Growing Quotes - Page 25

• History can be formed from permanent monuments and records; but lives can only be written from personal knowledge, which is growing every day less, and in a short time is lost forever.

  Samuel Johnson

  Personal Knowledge, Forever, Records

  Samuel Johnson (1821). “The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets: With Critical Observations on Their Works”, p.16

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• A good story is alive, ever changing and growing as it meets each listener or reader in a spirited and unique encounter, while the moralistic tale is not only dead on arrival, it's already been embalmed. It's safer that way. When a lively story goes dancing out to meet the imagination of a child, the teller loses control over meaning. The child gets to decide what the story means.

  Katherine Paterson

  Children, Mean, Unique

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• What earnest worker, with hand and brain for the benefit of his fellowmen, could desire a more pleasing recognition of his usefulness than the monument of a tree, ever growing, ever blooming, and ever bearing wholesome fruit?

  Washington Irving

  Hands, Tree, Brain

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• Failure would only be if you had somewhere stopped growing. As far as I can see the whole duty of the artist is to keep on growing.

  May Sarton

  Failure, Artist, Duty

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• Gardening is one of the rewards of middle age, when one is ready for an impersonal passion, a passion that demands patience, acute awareness of a world outside oneself, and the power to keep on growing through all the times of drought, through the cold snows, towards those moments of pure joy when all failures are forgotten and the plum tree flowers.

  May Sarton

  Flower, Passion, Snow

  May Sarton (2014). “Plant Dreaming Deep: A Journal”, p.77, Open Road Media

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• The lives of men who have been always growing are strewed along their whole course with the things they have learned to do without.

  Phillips Brooks

  Men, Courses, Whole

  Phillips Brooks, John Cotton Brooks (1910). “Sermons: The purpose and use of comfort, and other sermons”

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• The signs that presage growth, so similar, it seems to me, to those in early adolescence: discontent, restlessness, doubt, despair, longing, are interpreted falsely as signs of decay. In youth one does not as often misinterpret the signs; one accepts them, quite rightly, as growing pains. One takes them seriously, listens to them, follows where they lead. ... But in the middle age, because of the false assumption that it is a period of decline, one interprets these life-signs, paradoxically, as signs of approaching death.

  Anne Morrow Lindbergh

  Pain, Doubt, Growth

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• Sloth is the fastest-growing lifestyle movement in the world, and that's because it is completely doable. If you embrace sloth, it's the last thing you'll ever have to do again.

  Wendy Wasserstein

  Sloth, Movement, World

  Wendy Wasserstein (2005). “Sloth: The Seven Deadly Sins”, p.19, Oxford University Press on Demand

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• It is not strange that that early love of the heart should come back, as it so often does when the dim eye is brightening with its last light. It is not strange that the freshest fountains the heart has ever known in its wastes should bubble up anew when the lifeblood is growing stagnant. It is not strange that a bright memory should come to a dying old man, as the sunshine breaks across the hills at the close of a stormy day; nor that in the light of that ray, the very clouds that made the day dark should grow gloriously beautiful.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

  Beautiful, Death, Memories

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• Defend me, therefore, common sense, say
  From reveries so airy, from the toil
  Of dropping buckets into empty wells,
  And growing old in drawing nothing up.

  William Cowper

  Drawing, Common Sense, Toil

  'The Task' (1785) bk. 3 'The Garden' l. 187

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• The song
  Of Heaven is ever new; for daily thus,
  And nightly, new discoveries are made
  Of God's unbounded wisdom, power, and love,
  Which give the understanding larger room,
  And swell the hymn with ever-growing praise.

  Robert Pollok

  Song, Discovery, Hymns

  Robert Pollok (1868). “The Course of Time ... Twenty-fourth edition. With a memoir of the author”, p.155

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• All are friends in heaven, all faithful friends,
  And many friendships in the days of Time
  Begun, are lasting there and growing still.

  Robert Pollok

  Friends, Heaven, Faithful

  Robert Pollok, James Robert Boyd (1860). “Pollok's Course of Time”, p.186

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• Old age was growing inside me. It kept catching my eye from the depths of the mirror. I was paralyzed sometimes as I saw it making its way toward me so steadily when nothing inside me was ready for it.

  Simone de Beauvoir

  Eye, Mirrors, Age

  Simone de Beauvoir (1977). “Force of circumstance”

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• ... people are growing up in the slack flicker of a pale light which lacks the concentrated burn of a candle flame or oil wick or the bulb of a gooseneck desk lamp: a pale, wavering, oblong shimmer, emitting incessant noise, which is to real knowledge or discourse what the manic or weepy protestations of a drunk are to responsible speech. Drunks do have a way of holding an audience, though, and so does the shimmery ill-focused oblong screen.

  Adrienne Rich

  Growing Up, Real, Flames

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• Without peace there can be no prosperity for any people, rich or poor. And yet, there can be no peace without erasing the harshness of the growing contrast between the rich and the poor.

  Indira Gandhi

  Peace, Rich Or Poor, People

  Indira Gandhi (1975). “Indira Gandhi, speeches and writings”

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• [On growing up in a large family with little money:] ... to take a bath ... we just had a pan of water and we'd wash down as far as possible, and we'd wash up as far as possible. Then, when somebody'd clear the room, we'd wash possible.

  Dolly Parton

  Growing Up, Water, Littles

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• What is the use of being a little boy if you are growing up to be a man.

  Gertrude Stein

  Growing Up, Boys, Men

  Gertrude Stein (2013). “The Geographical History of America: Or the Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind”, p.43, Random House

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• In New Haven, Conn., when I was growing up, there were two sorts of Irish. There were the "drugstore cowboy" micks, who hung around the Elm Street poolroom over Longley's Lunch. And there were the earnest young Irishmen who fought their way up from the Grand Avenue saloonkeeper backgrounds of their fathers, went through Yale Law School, and have now found high place by the preferment of local politics or in the teaching profession.

  James T. Farrell

  Growing Up, Father, Book

  JAMES T. FARRELL (1938). “STUDS LONIGAN”

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• I did not write it [Coming of Age in Samoa] as a popular book, but only with the hope that it would be intelligible to those who might make the best use of its theme, that adolescence need not be the time of stress and strain which Western society made it; that growing up could be freer and easier and less complicated; and also that there were prices to pay for the very lack of complication I found in Samoa - less intensity, less individuality, less involvement with life.

  Margaret Mead

  Growing Up, Stress, Book

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• Sisters, while they are growing up, tend to be very rivalrous and as young mothers they are given to continual rivalrous comparisons of their several children. But once the children grow older, sisters draw closer together and often, in old age, they become each other's chosen and most happy companions. In addition to their shared memories of childhood and of their relationship to each other's children, they share memories of the same home, the same homemaking style, and the same small prejudices about housekeeping that carry the echoes of their mother's voice.

  Margaret Mead

  Mother, Children, Growing Up

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• True taste is forever growing, learning, reading, worshipping, laying its hand upon its mouth because it is astonished, casting its shoes from off its feet because it finds all ground holy.

  John Ruskin

  Reading, Feet, Hands

  John Ruskin (1849). “Of ideas of beauty”, p.25

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• Cupid and my Campaspe play'd
  At cards for kisses - Cupid paid:
  He stakes his quiver, bow, and arrows,
  His mother's doves, and team of sparrows;
  Loses them too; then down he throws
  The coral of his lips, the rose
  Growing one's cheek (but none knows how);
  With these, the crystal of his brow,
  And then the dimple of his chin:
  All these did my Campaspe win.
  At last he set her both his eyes -
  She won, and Cupid blind did rise.
  O Love! has she done this for thee?
  What shall, alas! become of me?

  John Lyly

  Love, Mother, Team

  John Lyly, “Cards And Kisses”

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• The true use of Shakespeare or of Cervantes, of Homer or of Dante, of Chaucer or of Rabelais, is to augment one's own growing inner self. . . . The mind's dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one's own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one's confrontation with one's own mortality.

  Harold Bloom

  Education, Reality, Self

  Harold Bloom (2014). “The Western Canon”, p.45, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• help that is not positively necessary is a hindrance to a growing organism.

  Dorothy Canfield Fisher

  Helping, Positively, Organisms

  Dorothy Canfield Fisher (1912). “A Montessori Mother”

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• But my belief is growing that our political and social evils are remediable, if only all of us who want a change for the better just get up and work for it, all the time, with as much knowledge and intelligence as we can muster for it. Half the wrongs of human life exist because of the inertia of people who simply will not use their energies in fighting for what they believe in. And finally the wrongs roll up into world catastrophes and millions of deaths and a terrible set-back for all mankind.

  Katherine Anne Porter

  Believe, Fighting, People

  Katherine Anne Porter, Isabel Bayley (1994). “Letters of Katherine Anne Porter”, p.291, Atlantic Monthly Press

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