Reinvention Quotes

“This is a new year. A new beginning. And things will change.”
― Taylor Swift

“A sudden, unanticipated death has a way of jolting us to our senses. Life as you know it will never be the same. It can be reinvented, reshaped into something different- but its never the same.”
― Keisha Blair, Holistic Wealth: 32 Life Lessons to Help You Find Purpose, Prosperity, and Happiness

“I don't know when the boys
began to walk away with parts of myself
in their sticky hands; when loving
became a process of subtraction. Or why,
having given up what seems so much,
I'm willing to lose even more — erasing
all this body's known, relearning it with you.”
― Melissa Stein

“Rather than trying to reinvent the wheel, build on to that which is already excellent.”
― Oscar Auliq-Ice

“[A]n old writer’s memory is the whore of his imagination. We all reinvent our pasts, I said, but writers are in a class of their own.”
― John le Carré, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life

“I am off to a life where I can exist in a room and not have to pretend I want to be there. I am off to hear people who have something to say. I don’t even have to agree with it— I just want to know what it’s like to listen to a real sentence. I long for a time where I don’t wish the day would be over. This means leaving the company. I can wonder, or I can wander—and it’s time for me to get lost. Reinvention is hard. To let it go? To admit you don’t love something anymore? That’s the stuff that kills you. But I must run before another workday asks for me again. Things are hard so that we can start. I feel like fate is blindfolding me. My arms reach out not knowing if I’ll impale myself or secure my foothold—but all great things come from motion. Nothing begets nothing. And I’m scared, but I have the movies with me. The things we love require us. I wonder what would happen if everyone in the world did what they loved. Would things fall into place and leave no empty spaces? Would there be harmony in the work field? Sustainable marriages? Children with parents? Dirty water? Would there be resignation letters?”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“I am still making order out of chaos by reinvention”
― John le Carre, Conversations With John le Carré

“Why can’t you just be yourself?” Stella asked once.
“Maybe I don’t know who that is,” her daughter shot back. And Stella understood, she did. That was the thrill of youth, the idea that you could be anyone. That was what had captured her in the charm shop, all those years ago. Then adulthood came, your choices solidifying, and you realize that everything you are had been set in motion years before. The rest was aftermath. So she understood why her daughter was searching for a self, and she even blamed herself for it.”
― Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half

“in pursuit of that glorious healing - until then, i’m a whirlwind”
― Malebo Sephodi

“It has always been hard for me to talk about Julian without romanticizing him. In many ways, I loved him the most of all; and it is with him that I am most tempted to embroider, to flatter, to basically reinvent. I think that is because Julian himself was constantly in the process of reinventing the people and events around him, conferring kindness, or wisdom, or bravery, or charm, on actions which contained nothing of the sort. It was one of the reasons I loved him: for that flattering light in which he saw me, for the person I was when I was with him, for what it was he allowed me to be.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“(The subjects of What Should I Do With The Rest Of My Life) "have convinced me that past failing can as easily prove preparatory as predictive. Age does not of itself limit on enable us. The choice is ours.”
― Bruce Frankel

“Every time we add a lens, it modifies how we experience the world. The difference between that contraption and a world view is that each time a new lens is added to our world view, the lenses remain in place. We must be vigilant about the lenses we admit, because they colour our view of the world, sometimes to our disadvantage. They can limit us, encourage us to seek to confirm evidence and make us hold on to mental models, business models and convictions even when they no longer serve us.”
― Aidan McCullen, Undisruptable: A Mindset of Permanent Reinvention for Individuals, Organisations and Life

“Three months, I thought. In idle moments, I retreated into that early-summer dream of reinvention, when you set your eyes on September and that refurbished self you were going to tool around in, honking the horn so people would take notice...”
― Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor

“Our inabilities to constantly reinvent us would disable new possibilities.”
― Seun Ayilara

“I think it's great to have a new life every 10 years or so.”
― Barbara Bush

“She can be anyone. Vengeful Hera, wrathful Hera, the queen of the heavens, most long-suffering of wives and cruellest of punishers, will continue without her. She can slip away from the tethers of who she was, find a sweetness in love again, and, for the first time, belong to the world rather than commanding it.”
― Jennifer Saint, Hera

“If you ain't native to a place, you have a better chance of becoming a gentleman in it.”
― George Lamming, In the Castle of My Skin

“We will make this time beautiful.

—Wren (a character in Mildred's Garden)”
― Laura Boggess, Mildred's Garden

“The timing wasn't great but most dream-chasing never was."

—Mildred (a character in Mildred's Garden)”
― Laura Boggess, Mildred's Garden

“Mistakes are revolutionary tools that open up new portals of achievement”
― Tare Munzara

“The past is not something fixed and unalterable. Its facts are re-discoverable by every succeeding generation, its values re-assessed, its meaning re-defined in the context of present tastes and preoccupations. Out of the same documents and monuments and works of art, every epoch invents its own Middle Ages, its private China, its patented and copyrighted Hellas.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception / Heaven and Hell

“It amazed me. Maria had been brought up in this place, and yet she had shone like a kingfisher flickering across the water. Perhaps that was why. Perhaps she looked at these streets and decided she was not part of them, and they were not part of her. She became what she chose to be, over and over again, every day. Something I could understand.”
― Alex Reeve, The House on Half Moon Street

“Reinvention requires both a kind of death and a desire to keep living. And so at its core, reinvention is inextricably linked to hope: the hope that we can find another way, take another shape.”
― Vivek Shraya, People Change

“i’ve arrived at a sort of emancipation moment. one that allows me to cultivate joy and pleasure in ways that feel liberatory. one that is radically indulgent and excessive. one that holds space for me in the midst of my fear - fear of my huge presence. fear of my light. fear of my weaknesses. fear of my sexuality. fear of my neurodivergence. fear of my magic. fear of my multiple selves and entities - one that allows me to reinvent myself as many times as this skinsuit is willing to carry me . one that grants me the permission to, in all its glory, make a “spectacle of myself”
― Malebo Sephodi

“Life is asking us to be flexible. I had to reinvent myself a hundred times just to find some peace of mind. Without flexibility, I would have been stuck in horrible situations.”
― Mitta Xinindlu

“Life is asking us to be flexible. Without flexibility, I would have been stuck in horrible situations.”
― Mitta Xinindlu

“I had to reinvent myself a hundred times just to find some peace of mind.”
― Mitta Xinindlu

“Lifting weights has trained me to understand my body not just as a consensus of cells, but as a critical mass—a medium where meaning is made. It's also helped me come to understand my own unsteady relationship with masculinity, not because I'm some big strongman in foxy Lycra pants who hogs the squat rack (though probably all of that too) but because it's breaking down my existing ideas of what manhood means and forcing me to rebuild them in my own image. Generations of American men have historically been instructed, through suggestion, inference, risk, reward, and punishment, not to express themselves, especially when that means sharing our feelings.”
― Michael Andor Brodeur, Swole: The Making of Men and the Meaning of Muscle

“Do you know the names of the stars?" I ask Luna.
Luna turns from the cauldron and points. "Those two at the very top are Lerrel and Sillis. The brightest one above the left eye is Shalev, and Mal is below the right. The dimmest is Ness--"
"Ness," I interrupt, feeling the name light me up like a firefly surrounded in pitch-black darkness. I like that this star is the dimmest in the entire constellation. I've spent too much of my life on the wrong stages and I wouldn't mind going unnoticed until I'm ready to present the best version of myself. "Call me Ness from now on.”
― Adam Silvera, First Face - A Ness Prequel Short Story

“The gray light washes over me again and gives me back everything that I was.
Not everything.
Eduardo Iron is dead like the world believes.
Ness Arroyo lives on.”
― Adam Silvera, First Face - A Ness Prequel Short Story