change
Try micro-dosing your change. Bring difference and variety into your life. Don’t keep doing what makes you feel dull, rigid, resentful, whatever. Be creative in the small changes—that, in itself, makes you mindful and aware. You’re not just going through the motions; you’re in motion.
“The Challenge of Change,” Jeanette Winterson’s Substack, February 20, 2022.
The death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius; for it commonly operates revolutions in our way of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or of youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up a wonted occupation, or a household, or style of living, and allows the formation of new ones more friendly to the growth of character.
“Compensation,” in The Spritual Emerson (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003), 130.
The reason to travel: there are inner transitions we can’t properly cement without a change of locations.
Twitter, April 12, 2010.
You want to be someone who has a tolerance for uncertainty and doubt, which means that you have the possibility of growth. Because if you keep the contradictions alive, if you keep the dialectics spinning, there’s the possibility of change.
Tony Kushner, quoted in the Signature Theatre Company’s summer 2010 flier welcoming him as the 2010–2011 twentieth anniversary playwright-in-residence.
Thought: To think you can change your life by changing its outward conditions is just like thinking, as I did as a boy, that by sitting on a stick and taking hold of it at both ends I could lift myself up.
January 15, 1891 entry, in Tolstoy’s Diaries Volume 1, 1847–1894, trans. by R. F. Christian (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), 300.
It’s very hard to stop doing things you’re used to doing. You almost have to dismantle yourself and scatter it all around and then put a blindfold on and put it back together so that you avoid old habits.
Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits, by Barney Hoskyns (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2010), 276.
I’ve been sick, joking aside. The trouble seems to be that I wasn’t taken up carefully enough in Franconia nor replanted soon enough in South Shaftsbury. It has been a bad job of transplanting. I lost a lot of roots (the tap root entirely) and the roots I have left are pretty well impaired by too long exposure to the air out of the ground. You’re a poet yourself and finely constituted; so you don’t have to be told how it is with poets. The time of year too has been against me, let them say what they will in rural journalism. Even in the case of evergrins [sic] I find that the fall is not a favorable time for transplanting. And I’m not an evergrin. It has gone hard with me.
October 11, 1920 letter to Louis Untermeyer, in The Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963), 118.