Quotes About Change

Her teenage fury had morphed into something else: power.

Moving to New York was about reinvention. If you didn't want that, you stayed in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

Change also comes when we learn to do something different, to make choices in our thinking and daily routines that interrupt a downward spiral and create an upward one.

We can take a daily inventory of how much exercise we get, how much sleep we get, our network of relationships, the meaning and sense of purpose that drives us, and the amount of stress we have. This inventory allows us to see if our lifestyles are supporting or undermining our ability to actualize positive change.

even though the false self is meant to protect the more vulnerable self, it actually has the effect of weakening it. When people who have become dependent on false-self functioning go into therapy or enter a 12-step program, they can go through a period of feeling very vulnerable and shaky because they are removing their coping strategy and exposing the pain underneath it. But over time, new healthy emotional habits get created, and new ways of healthy coping get practiced and adopted.

Science can now illuminate why approaches like psychodrama, 12-step programs, group therapy, journaling, bodywork, yoga, exercise, and massage work; why one-to-one therapy can help us learn a new style of attachment; why changing the way we live and the nature of our relationships can change the way we think and feel, and vice versa; and why quick fixes don't work but why a new design for living does.

Today there is help all around—articles abound on these subjects, 12-step rooms are around the corner, and help is down the hall in many schools and workplaces. But we have to reach out and take hold of the help. And we have to stick with it until we can create meaningful change in our lives.

Change comes when we have sat in the pain long enough and fully enough so that we can feel it, can open our mouths and talk about it, see it for what it is, reorder and understand it, and then walk out of it. This does not mean that we won't feel bad, hurt, angry, or triggered about our past again. It just means that if and when we are triggered, we won't catapult into an unconscious place from which we can only act out, shut down, or dive straight into self-medicating behaviors.

Once you've been backstage at a theater, the theater is never the same for you. Once you've noticed the crack in the vase, the vase is never the same for. Once you've seen a friend do something appalling, the friendship is never the same. That does not mean you won't go to the theater, or keep the vase or the friend. You can choose.

Dreams can change histories and songs can alter destinies.

we grew apart. The thing is, we loved each other, and on some level we always will, but when you're twenty-three and you fall in love, you tend to think that love will supercede any problems. Realizing that no matter how much you love somebody, no matter how desperately you want a relationship to work, life can act as an oxidizer and corrode it to pieces." - Loring Blackman

You know what I was thinking about on my way home? How different my life would be if you'd made that gash a little deeper. Or how different yours would be if I'd vaulted myself off a roof nine years ago. Do you ever think about things like that? Like, if either you or I wouldn't have made it, where would the other one be right now? It was something I thought about all the time: how death changes every remaining moment for those still living.

You can't wait forever for something, and then say it's too late when the time finally comes, even if every shred of incentive inside you has been lost.

It's never the truth that changes.

Everyone is always one decision away from a completely different life.

I nodded, refusing to consider the possibility that any of us are doomed to die the same sorry people we sometimes become.

How does that goddamn cliché go? If I'd known then what I know now. Or maybe I should have heeded the opposite warning. Maybe I should have delved a little deeper into then back when I was wandering aimlessly around now.

Nobody,   and I mean  nobody,   ever started a revo-lution playing by the rules." 

The thing is, Harp, everyone is always one decision away from a completely different life.

Realizing that no matter how much you love somebody, no matter how desperately you want a relationship to work, life can act as an oxidizer and corrode it to pieces.

Nobody, and I mean nobody, ever started a revolution playing by the rules.

Dreams can change histories and songs can alter destinies— two ideas that on good days I believe wholeheartedly and on bad days I denounce as a bunch of bull.

Do you think people can change?" I nodded, refusing to consider the possibility that any of us are doomed to die the same sorry people we sometimes become.

It was something I thought about all the time: how death changes every remaining moment for those still living.