Quotes About Change

How do you walk into someone's life again after twenty-eight years? How do you pick up, when you were too young to know where you left off.

At any moment, a person can start over. And that's not half a life, but simply a real one. (from Vanishing Acts)

But memory is like plaster: peel it back and you just might find a completely different picture.

There are all sorts of losses people suffer- from the small to the large. You can lose your car keys, your glasses, your virginity. You can lose your head, you can lose your heart, you can lose your mind. You can relinquish your home to move into assisted living, or have a child move overseas, or see a spouse vanish into dementia. Loss is more than just death, and grief is the gray shape-shifter of emotion.

Someone who was happy would have little need to hope for change. But, conversely, an optimistic person was that way because he wanted to believe in something better than his reality. He started wondering if there were exceptions to the rule: if happy people might be hopeful, if the unhappy might have given up any anticipation that things might get better.

I can't answer a single one of these, which is how I know that whether I'm ready or not, I'm growing up.

Until then she hadn't considered that there was a trade off, that she might not fit anymore in places where she'd been comfortable.

You couldn't fight the injustice of fate; you could only suffer it and hope that one day it might be different.

You're a fixer, Grant mused. You're also a colossal pain in the ass. The thing is, it's the pains in the ass that change the world.

It is a curious thing, watching a strong man fall to pieces.

Success would come only at the expense of losing her cool, at the risk of turning into someone she did not want to be.

But identification is not the same as knowing someone through and through—the man you fell in love with years ago might look the same and speak the same and smell the same yet be completely different.

So you believe people can't change? That once you do a bad thing, you're a bad person? I don't know, I admit.But I do think that some stains never wash out.

Sometimes you can't tell how consuming love is until you can see its absence. Sometimes you can't recognize love because it's changed you, like a chimera, so slowly that you didn't witness the transformation.

Just because you choose to leave a place did not mean that you could escape taking it with you. A man and a woman who lived together long enough might swap traits, until they found parts of themselves in each other. Jettison a personality and you just might find it taking up residence in the heart of the person you loved most.

You'd think a house would last forever, but the truth is a strong wind or a wrecking ball can devastate it. The family inside is not so different.

Danger came in different packages, at different points in a lifetime.

And when your wife is not the same person you fell in love with eight years ago, where exactly does that leave you? Do you try to get to know who she has become, and hope for the best? Or do you keep deceiving yourself in the hope that she might wake up one morning and have gone back to the woman she used to be? May be, Caleb thinks with a small shock, he isn't the same person he once was, either.

I've thought about all the things I could have done differently, and if it would have led to another outcome. But thinking doesn't change anything, does it?

Loss is more than just death, and grief is the gray shape-shifter of emotion.

How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world. —Anne Frank, Diary of a Young Girl

If only you could keep them that way: cast in amber, never growing up

All I'm saying is that the past is nothing but a springboard for the future.

You may not be able to choose your reality. But you can change it.