44 Quotes About Maturing

We would prefer all gain and no loss in life, yet that would gain us nothing more than great loss.

I am beginning to realize, at the ripe old age of twenty-nine, that one of the problems I have in life is a tendency to completely romanticize how things will be in the future, which inevitably leads to disappointment because it's pretty much never, never, what I expect

An unbearable unhappiness can make a young person unbelievably mature! Pain is a yeast; anyone whose soul is injected with this yeast transforms into something hard, just like a milk turning into a cheese!

The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our vulnerability, how we become larger and more courageous and more compassionate through our intimacy with disappearance, our choice is to inhabit vulnerability as generous citizens of loss, robustly and fully, or conversely, as misers and complainers, reluctant and fearful, always at the gates of existence, but never bravely and completely attempting to enter, never wanting to risk ourselves, never walking fully through the door.

...it's been amazing- not perfect, but amazing. I'm actually glad of the nonperfection because that has made our relationship feel more grounded, solid, and real than what I had (...), which just cruised blithely along, deceptively perfect, until it crashed and burned in a fiery wreck.

... a certain degree of introspection may help us age with equanimity. If the task of the first half of life is to put yourself out there, the task of the second half is to make sense of where you've been.

... Nor was it the normal, portentous intimacy of twenty-year-olds: [...] although we were at the age when one always has the need, instinct, and immodesty of inflicting on one another everything that swarms in one's head and elsewhere (and this is an age that can last long, but ends with the first compromise)...

Maturing is realizing how many things don't require your comment.

One can only hope that our horizons widen as we grow taller.