Elias Canetti Quotes

I am learning to see. I don't know why it is, but everything enters me more deeply and doesn't stop where it once used to. I have an interior that I never knew of... What's the use of telling someone that I am changing? If I'm changing, I am no longer who I was; and if I am something else, it's obvious that I have no acquaintances. And I can't possibly write to strangers.

When things fall apart in your life, you feel as if your whole world is crumbling. But actually it’s your fixed identity that’s crumbling. And as Chögyam Trungpa used to tell us, that’s cause for celebration.

And in that moment, everything I knew to be true about myself up until then was gone. I was acting like another woman, yet I was more myself than ever before.

We lose ourselves in what we read, only to return to ourselves, transformed and part of a more expansive world.

Ulysses finds himself unchanged, aside from his experience, at the end of his odyssey.

To become different from what we are, we must have some awareness of what we are.

You know, Motorcycle Diaries has no incredible stories, no sudden plot twists, it doesn't play that way. It's about recognizing that instance of change and embracing it.

When I saw Virginia Woolf, somewhere between the first and second acts, someone I had known as my mother became somebody else.

I was a changed being after that fight. I was nothing before. I was a man now.

It was quite a blow to have my perfect image of my father shattered, but that's something we all face before we come to full adulthood.

In my early shows, I wanted to put myself through a new childhood, disintegrating my whole identity to let the real one emerge.

The events of my twenties felt historic, but the people involved did not. I wanted a hero - someone who could make sense of what was happening around me and in some way redeem it.

Most of my world is in London, and I feel like this is where I went mad and ended up finding myself.

As a character, it's very interesting to play someone who wants to change their life and have him change it.

I walked a thousand miles just to slip this skin.

Is sobriety all that we are to expect of a spiritual awakening? No, sobriety is only a bare beginning; it is only the first gift of the first awakening. If more gifts are to be received, our awakening has to go on. As it does go on, we find that bit by bit we can discard the old life - the one that did not work - for a new life that can and does work under any conditions whatever.

I'm an amalgamation of what I've needed to be. Part scholar, part rebel, part nobleman, part Mistborn, and part soldier. Sometimes I don't even know myself. I had a devil of a time getting all those pieces to work together. And, just when I'm starting to get it figured out, the world up and ends on me.

I had hit a critical period in my life, where I changed very much as a person. I consider the person I used to be, dead, and I'm glad that he is. Insecure, frightened, confused, much like a lot of people I know today.

A man who says, 'I want to change, tell me how to', seems very earnest, very serious, but he is not. He wants an authority whom he hopes will bring about order in himself. But can authority ever bring about inward order? Order imposed from without must always breed disorder.

The solution begins with a deeper transformation that must occur in each of us. I AM isn’t as much about what you can do, as who you can be. And from that transformation of being, action will naturally follow.

The truth is that the man I am was born in those moments, as I stood near the flood sticks with my face lifted to the chrismal rain. Shantaram. The better man that, slowly, and much too late, I began to be.

You, too, can be carved anew by the details of your devotion.

Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.

Development involves giving up a smaller story in order to wake up to a larger story.

I kept asking myself if I felt different, if I was different. The answer was always yes. I was no longer nothing… How odd, I thought; it had taken my mother’s death, Father Quinel’s murder, and the desire of others to kill me to claim a life of my own.