John Lahr Quotes

It was funny, he reflected later, how one’s life could alter in an instant, how one minute everything could be a certain way, and the next it’s simply ... not

When you hear the word 'cancer,' it's as if someone took the game of Life and tossed it in the air. All the pieces go flying. The pieces land on a new board. Everything has shifted. You don't know where to start.

Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

Most want progress but hardly anybody wants change. Change is almost always a little traumatic.

All I know since yesterday is everything has changed.

How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps but on the whole just so, and then without warning you find the solid floor is a trapdoor and you are now in another place whose geography is uncertain and whose customs are strange?

You never knew which split second might be the zigzag bolt dividing all that went before from the everything that comes next.

With my mother's death all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life. There was to be much fun, many pleasures, many stabs of Joy; but no more of the old security. It was sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like Atlantis.

The world hasn't ended, but the world as we know it has-even if we don't quite know it yet.

Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.

Life doesn't care about your vision. You just gotta roll with it.

It's hard to plan for what comes next when what comes next is not something you planned for.

Everything is going to change.

The whole mad swirl of everything that was to come began then.

We live in stirring times- tea-stirring times.

Ideas disturb the levelness of life

Things are never going to turn out how you think they will.

I brought Hassan’s son from Afghanistan to America, lifting him from the certainty of turmoil and dropping him in a turmoil of uncertainty

Oh God! that one might read the book of fate, And see the revolution of the times Make mountains level, and the continent, Weary of solid firmness, melt itself Into the sea.

Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.

Richard wrote a mental diary in his head. Dear Diary, he began. On Friday I had a job, a fiance, a home, and a life that made sense. (Well, as much as an life makes sense). Then I found an injured girl bleeding on the pavement and I tried to be Good Samaritan. Now I've got no fiance, no home, no job, and I'm walking around a couple of hundred feet under the streets of London with the projected life expectancy of a suicidal fruit fly.

Expect the unexpected, my mother once said. Because the unexpected most certainly will be expecting you.

Everybody has accepted by now that change is unavoidable. But that still implies that change is like death and taxes - it should be postponed as long as possible and no change would be vastly preferable. But in a period of upheaval, such as the one we are living in, change is the norm.

At a time of great social upheaval, all things are possible.

Best to let the broken glass be broken glass, let it splinter into smaller pieces and dust and scatter. Let the cracks between things widen until they are no longer cracks but the new places for things. That was where they were now. The world wasn't ending: it had ended and now they were in the new place. They could not recognize it because they had never seen it before.