Sebastian Faulks Quotes

My past identity separates from me and remains in the past; he becomes someone else. Is memory really as insubstantial as the fragments of information that we store in our heads?

I change during the course of a day. I wake and I'm one person, and when I go to sleep I know for certain I'm somebody else.

I'm like Madonna: I keep reinventing myself.

I don't want to change the world; I want to evolve myself.

Because the more you changed, the less of you there was.

Nothing happens without personal transformation.

It hadn't been so long ago, yet sometimes she felt that she'd been an altogether different person back then.

The final goal of human effort is man's self-transforma tion.

We all know that a winter scene, though it may be covered over one day, with even the trees dressed in shawls of snow, will be unrecognizable the following spring. Yet I never imagined such a thing could occur within our very selves.

The Christian life is simply a process of having your natural self changed into a Christ self, and that this process goes on very far inside. One's most private wishes, one's point of view, are the things that have to be changed.

When you start to crack open, don't waste a moment gathering your old self up into something like you knew before. Let your new self splash like sunlight into every dark place and laugh and cry and make sounds you never made & thank all that is holy for the gift.

Every individual needs revolution, inner division, overthrow of the existing order, and renewal, but not by forcing them upon his neighbors under the hypocritical cloak of Christian love or the sense of social responsibility or any of the other beautiful euphemisms for unconscious urges to personal power.

It is not my experience that we are here to fix the world, that we are here to change anything at all. I think we are here so the world can change us. And if part of that change is that the suffering of the world moves us compassion, to awareness, to sympathy, to love, that is a very good thing.

I shut the bathroom door and caught sight of my face in the mirror. I had no idea how quickly it was to change, to fade. If I had, I would have stared at my reflection, memorizing it. It was the last time I would look into a real mirror for more than a decade.

One is always changing. I don't want to write the same book and I couldn't, because I'm a different person.

And then she thought that you went on living one day after another, and in time you were somebody else, your previous self only like a close relative, a sister or brother, with whom you shared a past. But a different person, a separate life. Certainly neither she nor Inman were the people they had been the last time they were together. And she believed maybe she liked them both better now.

Any transition serious enough to alter your definition of self will require not just small adjustments in your way of living and thinking but a full-on metamorphosis.

One of the most difficult things is not to change society - but to change yourself.

That person I was when I was a lot younger is not who I am today.

The weird thing is I feel like I'm shedding skin so fast and I'm growing and I'm becoming a new person so quickly at a rate that I'm comfortable with, yet it seems faster and more steady than an other time in my life except 16, 17, 18. I just have to sit down and listen to the ideas I'm having. And I'm not worried.

You count on it, you rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then, just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.

You have to have the ability to remake yourself. Whatever that is. Every several years... Every five to 10 years.

It is true that those we meet can change us, sometimes so profoundly that we are not the same afterwards, even unto our names.

You can't be born again, but you can change.

people are capable of profound metamorphosis, though unfortunately they rarely avail themselves of this genius, force of habit being an even greater enemy of change than cowardice.