Terri Apter Quotes

I saw my earlier selves as different people, acquaintances I had outgrown. I wondered how I could ever have been some of them.

The work of adult life is not easy. As in childhood, each step presents not only new tasks of development but requires a letting go of the techniques that worked before. With each passage some magic must be given up, some cherished illusion of safety and comfortably familiar sense of self must be cast off, to allow for the greater expansion of our distinctiveness.

A lot of people thought the sense of self was hard-wired, but it's not at all. It can be changed very quickly, and that's very intriguing.

We are sometimes as different from ourselves as we are from others.

I'm really fascinated by the self and how our selves shift and change over time and in relationship to different people.

You must begin to think of yourself as becoming the person you want to be.

I have become a different person. I don't know whether this person is better, he certainly is not happier.

When I left for college, I told myself that this was a chance for reinvention. No one on the other side of the country knew that I was an introvert, so maybe if I tried not acting like an introvert, I wouldn't be one.

Each of us becomes a new person as we re-describe the past.

If you want to write from life, you can't really write a story. People are always changing, and I think if we didn't look the same day-to-day, and our self weren't always in our body, would we even be the same? The continuity is in our bodies.

I've become someone else, really, like a role model.

Many associate me with the person I was when I was young. But I had a different role then, played in a different position.

I look older. Maybe it's the short hair or maybe it's just that I wear all that has happened like a mask. Either way, I always thought I would be happy when I stopped looking like a child. But all I feel is a lump in my throat. I am no longer the daughter my parents knew. They will never know me as I am now.

It's very common to think that we're always evolving, that we've changed so much from our younger selves, that within decades we've transformed into these different people. We like to think that. I feel in some ways that I am still so much my younger self. There are ways that I'm different: I feel like I'm wiser and kinder. But I think a lot of the impulses are still the same. I learned that.

A child, thought Carl, is not the only result of childbirth. A mother, too, is born. You see them every day--nondescript women with a bulge just above the groin, slightly double-chinned. Perpetually forty. Someone's mother, you think. There is a child somewhere who has made this woman into a mother, and for the sake of the child she has altered her appearance to better play the part.

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?

Ask any human being alive if they're the same person they were seven years ago and they're going to tell you they aren't.

A baseball manager has learned a lot about his job from having played the game, but a parent has not learned a thing from having once been a child.

I think through living one's life, one both changes and remains the same. One can see it either way, one can see oneself as being now what one was and one can see oneself as being absolutely different from what one was. It's a trick of thought.

An adolescent is both an impulsive child and a self-starting adult.

Children make the best measurements of time. It is only when I see the son or daughter of a friend or relative over periods of time, do I realize how much time has passed based on how much they've grown.

I used to be someone.

Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence, then, this worship of the past?

All parenting turns on a crucial question: to what extent parents should accept their children for who they are, and to what extent they should help them become their best selves.

Yet the definition we have made of ourselves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must make a new self. But how can the self make a new self when the selflessness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made?