Mark Lawrence Quotes

It is funny what a year can do.

Obviously I wouldn't have said that three or four years ago in the midst of it. But I really believe that. It's been a marvelous and important experience.

Time does not change us. It just unfolds us.

You never begin a new life. It's a mistake to think that you end one part of your life and start another as if there's no continuity.

It takes time to be who you really want to be. It doesn't happen overnight.

Because I'm not the same today as I was in '58, or '59 or even '71.

Well, I think the world changes around you - I think you don't change. That's as simple as that.

Everything changes with time. I am not so experienced enough to analyze what the people love in me.

I'm not the same young man I was when I first got into music.

There are so many people we could become, and we leave such a trail of bodies through our teens and twenties that it's hard to tell which one is us. How many versions do we abandon over the years?

Everybody is changing.

It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.

Every year I resolve to be a little less the me I know and leave a little room for the me I could be. Every year I make a note not to feel left behind by my friends and family who have managed to change far more than I.

Often I feel I go to some distant region of the world to be reminded of who I really am. There is no mystery about why this should be so. Stripped of your ordinary surroundings, your friends, your daily routines, your refrigerator full of your food, your closet full of your clothes -- with all this taken away, you are forced into direct experience. Such direct experience inevitably makes you aware of who it is that is having the experience. That's not always comfortable, but it is always invigorating.

When I first met him, he did not care if a friend did not fit into his world, because at that time his world had not been born yet.

Time is the enemy of identity

Life is strange. You keep moving and keep growing. Before you know it, you look back and think, "What was that?"

Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same.

Or maybe a person is just made up of a lot of peopleMaybe we’re accumulating these new selves all the time. Hauling them in as we make choices, good and bad, as we screw up, step up, lose our minds, find our minds, fall apart, fall in love, as we grieve, grow, retreat from the world, dive into the world, as we make things, as we break things.

It’s a funny thing coming home. Nothing changes. Everything looks the same, feels the same, even smells the same. You realize what’s changed, is you.

We all remember epochs in our experience when some dear expectation dies, or some new motive is born.

I’m not my name. My name is something I wear, like a shirt. It gets worn. I outgrow it, I change it.

I did not lose myself all at once.

That's what just hit me: How you really can't have everything. You have to give up the old to get the new. You can't be the child and the mom at the same time. You can't be your young self and your old self at the same time. You can't know what you know now and feel the way you did then. You can't, you can't, you can't.