Keith Gessen Quotes

You change as the years go by. The more knowledge you get, the more things change in your life and circumstances change.

It sounds creepy, but I always liked the idea of disappearing then becoming something new. That of course was before I disappeared.

In retrospect, the past seems not one existence with a continuous flow of years and events that follow each other in logical sequence, but a life periodically dividing into entirely separate compartments. Change of surroundings, interests, pursuits, has made it seem actually more like different incarnations.

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.

You make New Year's resolutions. And you make them into the teeth of old resolutions which were different. Then you don't keep your new resolutions and you tell yourself you are weak-willed. You aren't weak-willed, you are simply obeying yourself as of yesterday.

And if there's anything I do it's change and grow. I'm just a living being. Every year of my life I seem to learn that everything I know is wrong.

We cannot achieve our wildest dreams by remaining who we are

Anyone who isn't embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn't learning enough.

What is the most rigorous law of our being? Growth. No smallest atom of our moral, mental, or physical structure can stand still a year. It grows - it must grow; nothing can prevent it.

It takes years to develop into the kind of human being you want to be.

It's not easy being so frightened of everything. And when I think of how much I've improved in the last year, I wonder when I'll ever get finished with making changes and be really grown up.

There was about a two-year period at the end of the '60s, when I realized I was in the wrong place and entertaining the wrong people with the wrong material and that I was not being true to myself. I went through a metamorphosis into something more authentic for me, a more authentic stage voice and writing voice.

It is not the years but the changes that make us grow.

You cannot be the person they know and the great, glorious person you want to become. Not at the same time.

We're all going to change. Otherwise, it's boring. Who wants to stay the damn same all their life?

I'm sort of doing a lot of the things now that I never thought I would and that I wished I had done a year or so ago.

Don’t let the learning from your own experiences take too long. If you have been doing it wrong for the last ten years, I would suggest that’s long enough!

I'm not the same person that I used to be.

People always say I'm the Beatle who changed the most, but really that's what I see life is about... you have to change.

Any year that you don't destroy one of your best-loved ideas is probably a wasted year

I recognize thart even you, yourself, will change. Your ideals will change, your tastes will change, your desires will change. Your whole understandings of who you are had better change, because if it doesn't change, you've become a very static personality over a great many years, and nothing would displease me more. And so I recognize that the process of evolution will produce changes in you.

A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.

Take a stand, America! You deserve better. Resolve to live life vibrantly by looking to family, faith, and freedom in this new year!

If you don't change, then what's the point of anything happening to you? It'll still be happening to an unchanged person.

When the time comes for you to make a change or to grow, the universe will make you so uncomfortable you will eventually have no choice.