Quotes About Change

Be fearless enough to let love transform you.

Fear of being alone is not a good reason to stay. Leaving this man you've been with for six years won't be easy, but you'll be okay and so will he. The end of your relationship with him will likely also mark the end of an era of your life. In moving into this next era there are going to be things you lose and things you gain. Trust yourself. It's Sugar's golden rule. Trusting yourself means living out what you already know to be true.

Transformation doesn't ask that you stop being you. It demands that you find a way back to the authenticity and strength that's already inside of you. You only have to bloom.

Transformation isn't a butterfly. It's the thing before you get to be a pretty bug flying away. It's huddling in the dark cocoon and then pushing your way out. It's the messy work of making sense of your fortunes and misfortunes, desires and doubts, hang-ups and sorrows, actions and accidents, mistakes and successes, so you can go on and become the person you must next become.

And in the meanwhile, cultivate an understanding of a bunch of the other things that the best, sanest people of the planet know: that life is long, that people both change and remain the same, that every last one of us will need to fuck up and be forgiven, that we're all just walking and walking and walking and trying to find our way, that all roads lead eventually to the mountaintop.

The PCT had gotten easier for me, but that was different from it getting easy.

Don't stay when you know you should go or go when you know you should stay. Don't fight when you should hold steady or hold steady when you should fight.

I had diverged, digressed, wandered, and become wild.

My solo three-month hike on the Pacific Crest Trail had many beginnings. There was the first, flip decision to do it, followed by the second, more serious decision to actually do it, and then the long third beginning, composed of weeks of shopping and packing and preparing to do it. There was the quitting my job as a waitress and finalizing my divorce and selling almost everything I owned and saying goodbye to my friends and visiting my mother's grave one last time.

you are so goddamned young. Which means about eight of the ten things you have decided about yourself will over time prove to be false. The other two things will prove to be so true that you'll look back in twenty years and howl.

It felt now as if I'd never known them and I couldn't know them again. It seemed to me that whatever had existed back in the place where I'd grown up was so far away now, impossible to retrieve.

We live and have experiences and leave people we love and get left by them. People we thought would be with us forever aren't and people we didn't know would come into our lives do. Our work here is to keep faith with that, to put it in a box and wait. To trust that someday we will know what it means, so that when the ordinary miraculous is revealed to us we will be there, standing before the baby girl in the pretty dress, grateful for the smallest things.

the thread of my life that had been severed. I could feel it unspooling behind me—the old thread I'd lost, the new one I was spinning—while I hiked that morning,

When I believed that all the things I'd been before had prepared me for this journey. But nothing had or could. Each day on the trail was the only possible preparation for the one that followed. And sometimes even the day before didn't prepare me for what would happen next.

had to change. I had to change was the thought that drove me in those months of planning. Not into a different person, but back to the person I used to be—strong and responsible, clear-eyed and driven, ethical and good.

A glorious something else awaits.

Eight of the ten things you have decided about yourself at the age of twenty will, over time, prove to be false. The other two things will prove to be so true that you'll look back in twenty years and howl.

Just as I'd seemed to be doing okay after my mom died. Grief doesn't have a face.

Don't surrender all your joy for an idea you used to have about yourself that isn't true anymore.

The people in my life were like the BandAids that had blown away in the desert wind that first day on the trail. They scattered and then they were gone.

Sometimes you'll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.

the thing that had grown in me that I'd remember

There are so many tiny revolutions in a life, a million ways we have to circle around ourselves to grow and change and be okay.

But the opposite was true. The people in my life were like the Band-Aids that had blown away in the desert wind that first day on the trail. They scattered and then they were gone.