To grow up is to find the small part you are playing in the extraordinary drama written by somebody else.
Interpretation
Growing up involves recognizing your unique role in a larger narrative created by others.
This quote suggests that maturation is not just about age or physical development, but about understanding one's place and contribution within the grander scheme of life, where everyone plays a role in a story that is partly authored by external circumstances, experiences, and societal influences. It implies a sense of humility and recognition that one's life is intertwined with the lives and stories of others, highlighting the complexity of existence.
In practice
In a graduation speech, one might use this quote to encourage students to find their place in the world.
Truth is what is true, and it's not necessarily factual. Truth and fact are not the same thing. Truth does not contradict or deny facts, but it goes through and beyond facts. This is something that it is very difficult for some people to understand. Truth can be dangerous.
George MacDonald gives me renewed strength during times of trouble--times when I have seen people tempted to deny God--when he says, "The Son of God suffered unto death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like his.
If you don't recount your family history, it will be lost. Honor your own stories and tell them too. The tales may not seem very important, but they are what binds families and makes each of us who we are.
I never want to lose the story-loving child within me, or the adolescent, or the young woman, or the middle-aged one, because all together they help me to be fully alive on this journey, and show me that I must be willing to go where it takes me, even through the valley of the shadow.
The minute we begin to think we have all the answers, we forget the questions.
When we believe in the impossible, it becomes possible, and we can do all kinds of extraordinary things.
There is never a sudden revelation, a complete and tidy explanation for why it happened, or why it ends, or why or who you are. You want one and I want one, but there isn't one. It comes in bits and pieces, and you stitch them together wherever they fit, and when you are done you hold yourself up, and still there are holes and you are a rag doll, invented, imperfect. And yet you are all that you have, so you must be enough. There is no other way.
Those around you can have their novellas, sweet, their short stories of cliché and coincidence, occasionally spiced up with tricks of the quirky, the achingly mundane, the grotesque. A few will even cook up Greek tragedy, those born into misery, destined to die in misery. But you, my bride of quietness, you will craft nothing less than epic with your life. Out of all of them, your story will be the one to last.
I am a man of passions, capable of and subject to doing more or less foolish things- which I happen to regret, more or less, afterwards.
So since I'm still here livin', I guess I will live on. I could've died for love-- But for livin' I was born.
If God is the DJ, then Life is the dance floor; Love is the rhythm and You are the music.
The universe hands you opportunities for a while, and if you don't take them, the universe says to itself, 'Oh I see, this person doesn't like opportunities' and stops giving them to you.
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