growing Quotes

″‘And it will soon grow again, Dad,’ said one of the Small Foxes. ‘It will never grow again,’ said Mr. Fox. ‘I shall be tail-less for the rest of my life.‘”

“I will love you as we grow older, which has just happened, and has happened again, and happened several days ago, continuously, and then several years before that, and will continue to happen as the spinning hands of every clock and the flipping pages of every calendar mark the passage of time, except for the clocks that people have forgotten to wind and the calendars that people have forgotten to place in a highly visible area.”

“But the memory changes you, right? It makes you a different person.”

“This is not the moment to wilt into the underbrush of your insecurities. You’ve earned the right to grow.”

“I am enamour’d of growing out-doors.”

“There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.”

“As the child’s mind was growing into knowledge, his mind was growing into memory.”

“Our minds thus grow in spots; and like grease spots, the spots spread. But we let them spread as little as possible: we keep unaltered as much of our old knowledge, as many of our old prejudices and beliefs, as we can.”

“I want the loved person to grow and unfold for his own sake, and in his own ways, and not for the purpose of serving me.”

“It’s like my garden, love. Everything grows. Including love. And with that growing everyday how can you expect missing her to ever fade away? Everything builds, including our ability to cope with it. That’s how we keep going.”

“Trees and bushes grow over concrete, reclaiming little pockets and corners, but even more have been cleared away. Shattered glass crunches under my feet and clouds of dust drift in the wind, but somehow this place, the picture of neglect, doesn’t feel abandoned. I know this place from the histories, from the books and old maps.”

“Is there a lot of stuff you don’t understand? she said & I said pretty much the whole thing & she nodded & said that’s what she thought, but it was nice to hear it anyways and we sat there on the porch swing, listening to the wind & growing up together.”

“The Geys were determined to grow the first immortal human cells: a continuously dividing line of cells all descended from one original sample, cells that would constantly replenish themselves and never die”

“We do not believe that we ‘grow’ our lives - we believe that we ‘make’ them. Just listen to how we use the word in everyday speech: we make time, make friends, make meaning, make money, make a living, make love.”

“I once heard Alan Watts observe that a Chinese child will ask, “How does a baby grow?” But an American child will ask, “How do you make a baby?” From an early age, we absorb our culture’s arrogant conviction that we manufacture everything, reducing the world to mere “raw material” that lacks all value until we impose our designs and labor on it.”

“Sin happens whenever we refuse to keep growing.”

“They’ll take us down fast to the Birthday Flower Jungle. The best-sniffing flowers that anyone grows we have grown to be sniffed by your own private nose.”

“Spring is terribly exciting when you are living right in it”

“Flowers will die, the sun will set, but you are a friend, I won’t forget. Your name is so precious, it will never grow old. Its engraved in my heart, in letters of gold.”

“There we will, I pray, remain and learn and grow until the time when we will rise together to the ultimate heights, changing in appearance but never in devotion, sharing the transcendent glory of our love through all eternity.”

“Well, basically I have intuition. I mean, the DNA of who I am is based on the millions of personalities of all the programmers who wrote me. But what makes me me is my ability to grow through my experiences. So basically, in every moment I’m evolving, just like you.”

″ On Tuesday he ate through two pears, but he was still hungry.”

“On Wednesday he ate through three plums, but he was still hungry.”

“Now he wasn’t hungry any more- and he wasn’t a little caterpillar any more. ”

“But he was still hungry.”

“The caterpillar ate through one nice green leaf, and after that he felt much better.”

Funny, tough-minded and tender, this is the story of Matilda and her two sisters growing up in Sydney, Australia, in the early 1950s. Their father is mentally unstable and largely absent, their mother is possibly in the thrall of his brother, and a headline-making Russian spy defection is taking place next door.

Gemma and Raven are amazing characters, fully fleshed out and lovable. I liked how Gemma grew and learned that only because someone comes from a certain family, it doesn’t mean that he is less worthy or not a good friend.

“Small Bear, you have outgrown your little bed”

“He then proceeded to carve the nose; but no sooner had he made it than it began to grow. And it grew, and grew, and grew until in a few minutes it had become an immense nose that seemed it would never end.”

“I turned fifteen and my mother began to lose our wrestling matches. I grew six inches in a year, and by the time I was sixteen I was taller than my stepfather. He grumbled more often, that I should settle down, stop roaming the mountain like a wild monkey, marry into one fo the village families.”

“To Baby Oh, what shall my blue eyes go see? Shall it be pretty Quack-Quack to-day? Or the Peacock upon the Yew Tree? Or the dear little white Lambs at play? Say Baby. For Baby is such a young Petsy, And Baby is such a sweet Dear. And Baby is growing quite old now- She’s just getting on for a year.”

“On the other side of Blueberry Hill, Little Bear came with his mother to eat blueberries. ‘Little Bear,’ she said, ‘eat lots of berries and grow big and fat. We must store up food for the long, cold winter’. “

“I’ll stop and smile and think about how much you’ve helped me grow!”

″‘Does chocolate make you grow?’ ‘It makes you grow the wrong way,’ she snapped. ‘Up instead of down.‘”

“But we have to grow, Grandma. If we didn’t grow, we’d never be grown-ups.”

“Old Tom grew up very quickly. In fact, it wasn’t long before he outgrew his playpen. And when he did, Angela gave him the spare room. It was all clean and neat.”

“Had a good look at my face in the bathroom mirror today. I have got five spots as well as one on my chin. I have got a few hairs on my lip. It looks as if I shall have to start shaving soon.”

“Nayasha kept a small plot of land, on which she grew millet, sunflowers, yams, and vegetables. She always sang as she worked, and some said it was her singing that made her crops more beautiful than anyone else’s.”

“Your birth, Will, completed a circle that has been growing for four thousand years in every oldest part of this land: the circle of the Old Ones. Now that you have come into your power, your task is to make that circle indestructible.”

“Who scatters snowflakes? Who melts the ice? Who spoils the weather? Who makes it nice? Who grows the four-leaf clovers in June? Who dims the daylight? Who lights the moon? Four little field mice who live in the sky. Four little field mice…like you and I.”

“Every day they gave it plenty of milk- and soon it grew nice and plump.”

“Farmer Alfalfa grows all kinds of food. He keeps some of it for his family. He sells the rest to Grocer Cat in exchange for money. Grocer Cat will sell the food to other people in Busytown.”

“Then Alfalfa went to Blacksmith Fox’s shop. He had saved enough money to buy a new tractor. The new tractor will make his farm work easier. With it, he will be able to grow more food than he could grow before. He also bought some presents for Mommy and his son, Alfred.”

“He grew out of seven collars in a row.”

“Why, a stag is called a brocket until he is three years old, at four years he is a staggart; at five years a warrantable stag; and after five years he becomes a hart royal.”

“You will have to arrange things so I can go for a run. My legs are growing shorter, I am sure, with not exercising them. I shall have forgotten how to walk by the end of the week.”

″... Do you see this matchbox? Take it out into the meadow and open it. It will be a tiny dragon. The tiny dragon will grow into a big dragon.”

“For a time, life goes on normally and, eventually, Alice grows up. She goes to work in a library where people call her Miss Rumphius and she helps them find books they’re looking for.”

“Five o’clock came and flock of laughing girls from the clothing factory came surging through the gardens. A small doubt had been growing in Johnny’s mind for the last hour. What was he going to do if he didn’t find Abel and the other children?”

″...the truth is that as a man’s real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do.”

“Fog Benson had captured him when the cub was six months old. He had killed Ben’s mother and brought the young bear to town to show him off. And because Ben had cried for hours for his lost mother, Fog had laughingly named him ‘Squeaky Ben,’ after a local character with a querulous voice. As the cub grew and it became apparent his size would be tremendous, the ‘Squeaky’ part was dropped.”

“One of the strange things about adulthood is that you are your current self, but you are also all the selves you used to be, the ones you grew out of but can’t ever quite get rid of.”

“This was how mortal found fame, I thought. Through practice and diligence, tending their skills like garden until they glowed beneath the sun.”

“After a few days of rain, the seedlings will push through the soil and unfold their tiny leaves. Two weeks later, if the rain is still good, we then carefully apply the first round of fertilizer, because each seedling requires love and attention like any living thing if it’s going to grow up strong.”

“My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me. I attend to everything, dreaming all the while. […]. I’m two, and both keep their distance — Siamese twins that aren’t attached.”