Quotes About Change

transformation often depends that we separate our emotional responses from our rational minds.

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.

My love for him was indisputable, but my allegiance to him wasn't. We were no longer married, and as I settled alongside the Three Young Bucks into the bed I used to share with Paul, I felt a kind of acceptance of that, a kind of clarity where there'd been so much uncertainty.

world I thought would both make me into the woman I knew I could become and turn me back into the girl I'd once been.

This is not "how your story ends". It's simply where it take a turn you didn't expect.

them. I looked at the place I'd come from and the place I was going, the two equidistant from me. I was too far from either, so I forced my way forward.

was there in '63, when I was barely eighteen. But now

The thought of my youthful lack of humility made me nauseous now. I had been an arrogant asshole and, in the midst of that, my mother died.

Burn me," she said finally. "Turn me to ash." And so we did, though the ashes of her body were not what I'd expected. They weren't like ashes from a wood fire, silky and fine as sand. They were like pale pebbles mixed with a gritty gray gravel. Some chunks were so large I could see clearly that they'd once been bones.

I'm not afraid, I said, calling up my old mantra to calm my mind. But it didn't feel the same as it usually did to say it. Perhaps because that wasn't entirely true anymore. Perhaps by now I'd come far enough that I had the guts to be afraid.

She would always be my mother, I told her, but I had to go. She wasn't there for me in that flowerbed anymore anyway, I explained. I'd put her somewhere else. The only place I could reach her. In me.

These things are your becoming.

If it is impossible for you to go on as you were before, so you must go on as you never have.

There was the woman I was before my mom died and the one I was now, my old life sitting on the surface of me like a bruise. The real me was beneath that, pulsing under all the things I used to think I knew.

was who I was: the same woman who pulsed beneath the bruise of her old life, only now I was somewhere else.

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.

This is not how your story ends. It's simply where it takes a turn you didn't expect.

Sometimes those we forgive change their behavior to the extent that we can eventually be as close to them as we were before (or even closer).

anything could happen and that everything would. But that doesn't mean I wasn't shocked when it did.

I 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.

It's the threadbare cape you've wrapped around yourself composed of self-pitying half truth. And it absolutely will not serve you.

And in the meanwhile, cultivate an understanding of a bunch of the other things that the best, sanest people on 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.

Testing yourself means relinquishing the things you believe have so far kept you safe or comfortable

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.