Edna St. Vincent Millay Quotes

We die a little every day and by degrees we’re reborn into different men, older men in the same clothes, with the same scars.

A home is a place in time. And no place stays the same after you finally grow up and leave it. No place can ever change as much as the person who grows up there.

History may be servitude. History may be freedom. See, now they vanish. The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them, to become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.

Time is never time at all. You can never ever leave without leaving a piece of youth. And our lives are forever changed. We will never be the same. The more you change, the less you feel.

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.

Teenagers ultimately don't mind belonging to a group, because there's always the opportunity to eventually become someone new. The elderly, by definition, are running out of opportunities for reinvention.

I think every girl's dream is to find a bad boy at the right time, when he wants to not be bad anymore.

The important thing is this: to be able, at any moment, to sacrifice what we are for what we could become.

I do not agree with Thomas Wolfe... about anything. You can go home again as long as you don't expect home to be what it was when you left it. Or you don't expect yourself to be what you were when you left home.

Let a man turn to his own childhood - no further - if he will renew his sense of remoteness, and of the mystery of change.

Before I was a mum, I could live in another dimension, create another world, and it wouldn't bother me if I was not totally available or totally myself. Today I cannot do that anymore.

Any sort of major change we want to make in our life is hard. Change is not easy and true change takes time and takes thousands, millions probably, of failures along that path and that's the interesting thing.

With time, everything changes. I know I'm not the same person who I used to be. I totally get that.

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

Children are caterpillars and adults are butterflies. No butterfly ever remembers what it felt like being a caterpillar.

Who would deduce the dragonfly from the larva, the iris from the bud, the lawyer from the infant? ...We are all shape-shifters and magical reinventors. Life is really a plural noun, a caravan of selves.

Time is the enemy of identity

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.

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

Like seeing a photograph of yourself as a child, encountering handwriting that you know was once yours but that now seems only dimly familiar can inspire a confrontation with the mystery of time.

I did not lose myself all at once.

Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.

I want to make change, but I've already made change. I will continue to make change. I'm not just running on a promise of change.

You aren't an object. You're a process of some sort.