Anne Roiphe Quotes

We do not necessarily improve with age: for better or worse we become more like ourselves.

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.

All life events are formative. All contribute to what we become, year by year, as we go on growing. As my friend the poet Kenneth Koch once said, You aren't just the age you are. You are all the ages you ever have been!

The fact is that five years ago I was, as near as possible, a different person to what I am tonight. I, as I am now, didn't exist at all. Will the same thing happen in the next five years? I hope so.

All of us every single year, we're a different person. I don't think we're the same person all our lives.

There are people who are uncanny, who are finished products at a young age. I wasn't, thank God.

Well-being changes as we move through life, which is why a child's version of it cannot be the same as an old person's.

I think I'm one of those people that kind of thinks everybody's got an identity, and maybe that's the core of their personality. But I think we change enough over the years that it's like a succession of different people.

Whoever undertakes to create soon finds himself engaged in creating himself. Self-transformation and the transformation of others have constituted the radical interest of our century, whether in painting, psychiatry, or political action.

If one sees the personality not as an apparatus that is essentially constructed by the time childhood is over, but as always in its essence developing, then life at 25 or 30 or at the gateway to middle age will stimulate its own intrigue, surprise, and exhilaration of discovery.

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

I'm only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.

You are your own forerunner, and the towers you have builded are but the foundation of your giant-self. And that self too shall be a foundation.

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.

It is reasonable that a man should be something worthier at the end of the year than he was at the beginning.

Character is the result of hundreds and hundreds of choices you make that gradually turn who you are, at any given moment, into who you want to be.

Today, you've got a decision to make. You're gonna get better or you're gonna get worse, but you're not gonna stay the same. Which will it be?

People can start out one way, and by the time life gets through with them they end up completely different.

You never stay the same. You either get better or you get worse.

Time had a way of moulding people into shapes they themselves no longer recognised.

Everything is in flux: everything changes; the body changes, the soul changes. We are capable of extraordinary self-transmutat ion and internal self-transforma tion.

Everyone journeys through character as well as through time. The person one becomes depends on the person one has been.

We barely have enough time to figure out who we are and then we become bitter and isolated as we age.