#hang

Refrain to-night; And that shall lend a kind of easiness To the next abstinence, the next more easy; For use almost can change the stamp of nature, And either master the devil or throw him out With wondrous potency. ↗

— William Shakespeare

#priorities #self-control #self-improvement #uprightness #change

I don't know what this great thing I'm meant to be doing is, and it looks to me as if I was supposed not to know. And I resent that, right? "The old me knew. The old me cared. Fine, so far so good. Except that the old me cared so much that he actually got inside his own brain--my own brain--and locked off the bits that knew and cared, because if I knew and cared I wouldn't be able to do it. [...] "But this former self of mine killed himself off, didn't he, by changing my brain? Okay, that was his choice. This new me has its own choices to make, and by a strange coincidence those choices involve not knowing and not caring about this big number, whatever it is. That's what he wanted, that's what he got. "Except this old self of mine tired to leave himself in control, leaving orders for me in the bit of my brain he locked off. Well, I don't want to know, and I don't want to hear them. That's my choice. I'm not going to be anybody's puppet, particularly not my own. [...] "The old me is dead! [...] Killed himself! The dead shouldn't hang about trying t0 interfere with the living. ↗

— Douglas Adams

#change

Tears had poured from her eyes without any change in her facial expression. It’s pure pain and pure surrender when your soul cries without any fight from your body and that’s how I knew she was deeply affected. ↗

— Renee Carlino

#pain #soul #tears #change

And what's the point of changing when I'm happy as I am? ↗

— Paul McCartney

#life #wisdom #change

We had our thing. It is a really good memory but now we're older. Things change. ↗

— Abbi Glines

#past #change

As I saw it, all my mother's life, my father held her down, like lead strapped to her ankles. She was buoyant by nature; she wanted to travel, go to the theater, go to museums. What he wanted was to lie on the couch with the Times over his face, so that death, when it came, wouldn't seem a significant change. ↗

— Louise Glück

#men-and-women #parents #relationships #change

For fate may hang on any moment and at any moment be changed. ↗

— Jeanette Winterson

#fate #jeanette-winterson #sexing-the-cherry #change

Everything changes, it all stays the same, Everyone guilty, no one to blame, Every way out, brings you back to the start, Everyone dies to break somebody's heart... ↗

— Motorhead

#song #change

The book was in her lap; she had read no further. The power to change one’s life comes from a paragraph, a lone remark. The lines that penetrate us are slender, like the flukes that live in river water and enter the bodies of swimmers. She was excited, filled with strength. The polished sentences had arrived, it seemed, like so many other things, at just the right time. How can we imagine what our lives should be without the illumination of the lives of others? ↗

— James Salter

#literature #reading #words #change

...my boredom might be described as a malady affecting external objects and consisting of a withering process; an almost instantaneous loss of vitality--just as though one saw a flower change in a few seconds from a bud to decay and dust. ↗

— Alberto Moravia

#change