Paul Theroux Quotes

I never want to change so much that people can't recognize me.

Twenty years is, after all, a long time. We are not the same people we were. Old friends, lovers, even family members: they are strangers who happen to wear a familiar face. We have no right to claim to know anyone after such a distance.

We can change so many times in our lives. We're born into a family, and it's the only life we can imagine, but it changes. Buildings collapse. Fires burn. And the next second we're someplace else entirely, going through different motions and trying to keep up with this new person we've become.

I don't see myself as a different guy than I was ten years ago. I don't have aspirations to be. It's really about where you're putting your energies. That's changing a lot.

I aim here only at revealing myself, who will perhaps be different tomorrow, if I learn something new which changes me.

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

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

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

It's amazing how close I have been, all this time, to my old life. And yet the distance that divides me from it is vast.

What you once were isn't what you want to be anymore.

You have to let go of who you were, to become who you will be.

There is no such thing as maturity. There is instead an ever-evolving process of maturing. Because when there is a maturity, there is a conclusion and a cessation. That’s the end. That’s when the coffin is closed. You might be deteriorating physically in the long process of aging, but your personal process of daily discovery is ongoing. You continue to learn more and more about yourself every day.

Great minds have always seen it. That is why man has survived his journey this long. When we fail to wish any longer to be otherwise than what we are, we will have ceased to evolve. Evolution has to be lived forward. I say this as one who has stood above the bones of much that has vanished, and at midnight has examined his own face.

Maybe we've grown out of each other.

I've been sober for so many years. It wasn't like you flick a switch, and you're sober. It takes a while. You have to learn how to do everything all over again. You can measure how long that takes in terms of years.

When I start to write something, I suppose I want it to change me, to make me into something not myself.

We're not the same people we were then. We've changed, we've grown.

Everything that comes our way is so we can grow and evolve, and if we look at it like that, then we have the great opportunity to step into who we always wanted to be.

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

People change, but only if you give them room to do it.

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

It's been a long time since I've been me.

If you knew me in the past, please do not think that I am the same person that you are meeting today. I have experienced more of life, I have encountered new depths in those I love, I have suffered and prayed and I am different.

You don't really think about [career] much, because in a way it seems like another time and a different person.