#grow

Reading all my old love letters was disorienting. You remember thinking the thoughts and writing the words but, man, you can't TOUCH those feelings. Its like they belonged to someone else. Someone you don't even know. I'm aware, in an intellectual way. That I felt all those things about him, but this emotions are far away now. What's so strange to me is that I can't even force my heart back to that place where I felt that all consuming passion. That makes me feel distant from myself. Who WAS I then? Will I ever be able to get back to that place? Reading the letters again made me wonder: Which is the real me? The one who saw the world in that emotionally saturated way, or the me who sees it the way I do now? ↗

— Bill Shapiro

#looking-back #nostalgia #reflection #love

It is not that we love to be alone, but that we love to soar, and when we do soar, the company grows thinner and thinner until there is none at all. …We are not the less to aim at the summits though the multitude does not ascend them. ↗

— Henry David Thoreau

#growth #love

I have lost and loved and won and cried myself to the person I am today. ↗

— Charlotte Eriksson

#character-building #growing-up #heartbreak #learning-by-doing #life

Anger makes you smaller, while forgiveness forces you to grow beyond what you are. ↗

— Cherie Carter-Scott

#forgiveness #growth #anger

Maturity is when your world opens up and you realize that you are not the center of it. ↗

— M.J. Croan

#growing-up #maturity #maturity

It is the darkness that makes the light visible, and not the other way around. ↗

— Nancy Venable Raine

#spiritual-growth #spiritual-growth

If you didn't grow up like I did then you don't know, and if you don't know it's probably better you don't judge. ↗

— Junot Díaz

#growing-up #humor #judgment #knowing #experience

What lived on-in me- was the discomfort of how completely I'd outgrown the novel I'd once been so happy to live in ↗

— Jonathan Franzen

#home #home

She was returning home to be the wife of, mother of, First Lady of, but what did that really mean? ↗

— Stacy Hawkins Adams

#fictional-character #identity-crisis #personal-growth #home

God has such gladness every time he sees from heaven that a sinner is praying to Him with all his heart, as a mother has when she sees the first smile on her baby's face. ↗

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#spiritual-growth #spiritual-growth