Quotes About Change

Older people are wise not only because they have lived longer. They're wise because they have lost more.

We routinely replace damanged parts of ourselves with new ones that are, arguably, more resilient, more able to handle challenges. As long as we avoid the trap of growing our skin so thick that nothing gets through, getting bruised can only boost our ability to cope with whatever life throws at us.

From this perspective, creativity is a means of diffusing and managing loss, of transforming it into something that we can tolerate and live through, and, in the long run, perhaps even use as a basis for new life.

One way to understand the matter is to recognize that when we mourn, we not only grieve the vanishing of treasured objects, but also those versions of ourselves that thrived within a particular (now lost) relational dynamic. In this manner, loss compels us to discard outmoded facets of the self. While this may give rise to bouts of regret and nostalgia, in the final analysis it serves to replenish the self in that it engenders new inner intensities and unforeseen psychic possibilities.

Within this mercurial reality, our happiness depends less on how well or badly we tackle the myriad ordeals of our lives than on how dexterously we withstand the fact that the ground underneath our feet shifts constantly.

This is one reason that improving our external circumstances may not always be enough to alleviate our longstanding anxieties or to make us feel more empowered; to the extent that the unconscious is committed to preserving the past—even when this past is not what we would have chosen—in an unchanging form, it can prevent our inner lives from catching up with modifications of our external conditions.

On this view, our identities acquire depth and vitality not from any innate kernel of being, but from a gradual layering of stories. This in turn implies that the most current story that we tell about ourselves is merely the most recent draft of our life.

When I was younger, I walked on my toes and made clicking sounds with my tongue. A therapist taught me how to stop.

I was always anti-marriage. I didn't understand monogamy. I couldn't figure out how that could last. And then I met Bryn and I started to understand the beauty of constancy and history and change and going on the roller coaster with someone - of having a partner in life.

Dr. King's leadership reaffirmed the promise of our democracy: that everyday people, working together, have the power to change our government and our institutions for the better.

Life and death aren't as different from each other as I thought they were. This isn't like walking into a new country. This is like walking into a new room in the same house. This is like sharing a hallway and the same row of framed family pictures, but there's a glass wall between.

Some days I'm just sixteen, and sixteen isn't what I want to be.

We all know a boy can't daddy until his daddy's dead.

Maybe every monster is a miracle meant to change the world.

Any season / is a season for blood, if you look at it in the right light.

You don't really own anything. Nothing is yours forever, not your body, not your youth, not even your mind.

I'm this thing that emerged from it, some kind of miserable Phoenix.

They were the cream of the crop, but soon they'd be chaff, scythed from swordsmen into skeletons.

We haven't slept in years. This is an advantage of menopause. Some nights, we meet for coffee at 4:00 a.m.

Let him grow up, I was thinking the whole time. That's an old prayer. It comes in every language.

The job of love goddess is a rotating one. You get it when you get there.

Wer liebt, ist blind, taub und stumm. Die Liebe verändert den Rhythmus der Tage. Sie macht uns glauben, es sei Sommer, wenn der Herbstregen fällt. Wir spüren mitten in der Sonne Kälteschauer wie im Winter. Sie ist trügerisch und spielt mit uns, dass wir auf das Unmögliche vertrauen...

It is curious to observe how customs and ceremonies degenerate.

Though he had determined upon this in the first moment of joyful enthusiasm, yet the delay of four-and-twenty hours had made a material change in his feelings; his most virtuous resolves were always rather the effect of sudden impulse than of steady principle.