“Anytime you’re gonna grow, you’re gonna lose something. You’re losing what you’re hanging on to to keep safe. You’re losing habits that you’re comfortable with; you’re losing familiarity.”— James Hillman, thesunmagazine.org
“After a while you learn the subtle difference Between holding a hand and chaining a soul, And you learn that love doesn’t mean leaning And company doesn’t mean security. And you begin to learn that kisses aren’t contracts And presents aren’t promises, And you begin to accept your defeats With your h…”— Jorge Luis Borges, hellopoetry.com
“I wonder if, as you get older, you stop missing people so fiercely. Maybe growing up is just focusing on what you’ve got, instead of what you don’t.”— Jodi Picoult, amazon.com
“Just because I liked something at one point in time doesn’t mean I’ll always like it, or that I have to go on liking it at all points in time as an unthinking act of loyalty to who I am as a person, based solely on who I was as a person. To be loyal to myself is to allow myself to grow and change, a…”— Jarod Kintz, amazon.com
“Life is a vexatious trap; when a thinking man reaches maturity and attains to full consciousness he cannot help feeling that he is in a trap from which there is no escape.”— Anton Chekhov, amazon.com
“It is time which imparts strength to all things and brings them to maturity.”— Hippocrates, amazon.com
“It takes years and maturity to make the discovery that the power of faith is nobler than the power of doubt; and that there is a celestial wisdom in the ingenuous propensity to trust, which belongs to honest and noble natures.”— Harriet Beecher Stowe, amazon.com
“Moment to moment, we can grow, if we can bring ourselves to meet the moment with our lives.”— Muriel Rukeyser, amazon.com
“It was the passions about whose origin we deceived ourselves that tyrannized most strongly over us.”— Oscar Wilde, amazon.com
“It seems to me that the years between eighteen and twenty-eight are the hardest, psychologically. It’s then you realize this is make or break, you no longer have the excuse of youth, and it is time to become an adult – but you are not ready.”— Helen Mirrin, amazon.com
“If they took back the pain they caused, you'd lose the strength you gained.”— Rachel Wolchin, twitter.com
“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.”— Heath L. Buckmaster, amazon.com
“To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.”— Henri Bergson, amazon.com
“I’m five again. No matter how much I think I’ve matured, I always end up back at five when I cry.”— Libba Bray, amazon.com
“It is impossible, after a certain point, to go back to a previous way of life, a previous way of thinking.”— Henry Rollins, amazon.com
“The only time you truly become an adult is when you finally forgive your parents for being just as flawed as everyone else.”— Douglas Kennedy, amazon.com