We grow apart because we grow in different stages and not all of our stages align.

I have outgrown so much, I think at some point we all do ~ we reach a stage in our life where we are forced to make a change, forced to cut friendships, relationships, jobs and places we once called home. At the time, it all feels a little overwhelming nothing stays the same and you have to learn your footing again but I can reassure you once you create the path you wish to walk along, what you left behind won't even matter.

I am thankful that there are those among us who have sacrificed dearly on behalf of us. And I ardently pray to God that I might be less like myself and more like them.

You can’t just be. You have to become.

Our long wanderings have made a man out of him, too. They have not only strengthened his frame and hardened his constitution, but they have given stability to his character. He is thoughtful and prudent, and his advice will always be valuable, while of his courage I have no doubt.

My innocence is not lost—it has been converted into wisdom. The sensation we call "breaking" is the pain that comes from resisting the truth. Life broke parts of me that needed to fall away for me to live an open and truthful life.

We become the product of our recurrent thoughts. Writing is one method of explicating upon our thoughts, condensing multiple scenes, times, and ideas, and editing our fragmented beliefs.

We are the sum total of our experiences. Those experiences – be they positive or negative – make us the person we are, at any given point in our lives. And, like a flowing river, those same experiences, and those yet to come, continue to influence and reshape the person we are, and the person we become. None of us are the same as we were yesterday, nor will be tomorrow.

Our experiences are the building blocks of the future hewn out of the granite of the present.

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I reasoned as a child, but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

The Holy Spirit is described as the Comforter, like a mother would be a comforter to her child.  It is also said of the Spirit that He will lead us into all truth.  Who instructs children?  It is generally the mom, since she is with her kids most of the time. Who teaches baby Christians and weans them off of milk and into greater spiritual truths?  The Holy Spirit.

...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.

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

Every child matures, which is both a blessing and a damn shame. Children can imagine worlds that never exist, worlds far more interesting and consoling than an adult knows.

It is in building the best of our abilities that we ultimately destroy the worst of our liabilities.

The adult within me would be much wiser to learn from the child within me rather than focus on the demand that the child within me grow up.

No, everybody's gotta learn, nobody's born knowin'. That Walter's as smart as he can be, he just gets held back sometimes because he has to stay out and help his daddy. Nothin's wrong with him. Naw, Jem, I think there's just one kind of folks. Folks." .... "That's what I thought too," he said at last, "when I was your age. If there's just one kind of folks, why can't they get along with each other? If they're all alike, why do they go out of their way to despise each other? Scout, I think I'm beginning to understand why Boo Radley's stayed shut up in the house all this time . . . it's because he wants to stay inside.

The greatest mistake is to think that we ever know why we do things...I suppose the nearest we can ever come to it is by getting what old people call 'experience.' But by the time we've got that we're no longer the persons who did the things we no longer understand. The trouble is, I suppose, that we change every moment; and the things we did stay.

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

You do know, I hope, that no man under the age of forty can even approach fascinating.

I've always figured it that you die each day and each day is a box, you see, all numbered and neat; but never go back and lift the lids, because you've died a couple of thousand times in your life, and that's a lot of corpses, each dead a different way, each with a worse expression. Each of those days is a different you, somebody you don't know or understand or want to understand.

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