Quotes About Reinvention

“The reinvention of daily life means marching off the edge of our maps”

— Bob Black

“Advice from a Caterpillar
Chew your way into a new world.
Munch leaves. Molt. Rest. Molt
again. Self-reinvention is everything.
Spin many nests. Cultivate stinging
bristles. Don't get sentimental
about your discarded skins. Grow
quickly. Develop a yen for nettles.
Alternate crumpling and climbing. Rely
on your antennae. Sequester poisons
in your body for use at a later date.
When threatened, emit foul odors
in self-defense. Behave cryptically
to confuse predators: change colors, spit,
or feign death. If all else fails, taste terrible.”

— Amy Gerstler

“While for critics of sprawl the generic signifies a loss of local identity and connection to place, for Koolhaas it represents an opportunity for reinvention and fantasy free from nostalgia or provincial habit. He admires the generic's accessibility, impermanence, economy of imagination, and malleable lack of authenticity or moralizing agenda.”

— Graham Owen

“If you accept your misfortune and handle it right, your perceived failure can become a catalyst to profound reinvention.”

— Conan O'Brien

“For the first time ever, I was alone in a different country. I was nervous about how I was going to cope in this big bustling city and so I employed a technique which still serves me well today. I imagined myself as someone who relished new exciting opportunities, who was utterly unafraid and perpetually optimistic. It was a kind of reinvention. Everyone I met was new. These people didn't know me, there was no shared history, so I could be anything or anyone I wanted to be. My theory was that if I behaved like a confident, cheerful person, eventually I would buy it myself, and become that. I always had traces of strength somewhere inside me, it wasn't fake. It was just a way of summoning my courage to the fore and not letting any creeping self-doubt hinder my adventures. This method worked then, and it works now.”

— Dawn French

“Today's young people want to know everything about everyone. They think talking about a problem will solve it. I come from a quieter generation. We understand the value of forgetting, the lure of reinvention.”

— Kristin Hannah

“The physical reinvention of the world is endless, relentless, fascinating, exhaustive; nothing that seems solid is. If you could stand at just a little distance in time, how fluid and shape-shifting physical reality would be, everything hurrying into some other form, even concrete, even stone.”

— Mark Doty

“Fashions are not fashions at all but refashioning; language is not communication but reinvention. They are never in place but on display.”

— Dionne Brand

“As I've said before, "the Mod generation", contrary to popular belief, was not born in even 1958, but in the 1920s after a steady gestation from about 1917 or so. Now, Mod certainly came of age, fully sure of itself by 1958, completely misunderstood by 1963, and in a perpetual cycle of reinvention and rediscovery of itself by 1967 and 1975, respectively, but it was born in the 1920s, and I will maintain this. I don't care who disagrees with me, and there are dozens of reasons that I do so -from the Art Deco aesthetic, to flapper fashions (complete with bobbed hair), to androgyny and subtle effeminacy, to jazz.”

— Ruadhan J. McElroy

“I believe that one defines oneself by reinvention. To not be like your parents. To not be like your friends. To be yourself. To cut yourself out of stone.”

— Henry Rollins

“So I pulled back from everything and everyone I'd known ... I realized I'd been changing even before we started moving,that my reinvention began when I was still in the most familiar of places. Once the setting was totally new,though, I finally could be,as well.”

— Sarah Dessen

“Making you believe what he wanted you to believe was his very reason for being. Maybe his only reason. I was intrigued by the way he turned events, or hints I had given him about people, into reality
that is, his kind of reality. This obsessive reinvention of the real never stopped, what-could-be having always to top what is.
...
I began to wonder which was real, the woman in the book or the one I was pretending to be upstairs. Neither of them was particularly "me." I was acting just as much upstairs; I was not myself just as much Maria in the book was not myself. Perhaps she was. I began not to know which was true and which was not, like a writer who comes to believe that he's imagined what he hasn't.
...
The book began living in me all the time, more than my everyday life.”

— Philip Roth

“Perfect is an illusion, one that was created to maintain the status quo. The Six Sigma charade is largely about hiding from change, because change is never perfect. Change means reinvention, and until something is reinvented, we have no idea what the spec is.”

— Seth Godin

“The Facebook of 2011, the Twitter of 2011 and the Google of 2011 are all understood to be in need of reinvention for a mobile-centric world with no clear strategy to make revenue.”

— Keith Teare

“I watch everybody every night, from sitting down to being on their feet at the end, and I feel a sense of reinvention, of caring, presenting these songs in their purest form.”

— Bryan Adams

“I understand what it is to go through emotional trauma and retreat and go into the world of your imagination. I understand how art and music can be a place of safety in a world of reinvention.”

— Sam Taylor-Wood

“There's definitely a pattern of great British shows that get reinvented in America and do really well here, but I think 'Torchwood' is a bit different. It's more of a hybrid that doesn't exist as a reinvention.”

— Bill Pullman

“I don't know that 'NCIS: Los Angeles' is a complete reinvention, but I'm playing one of the guys in charge this time. Before I'd be cast as a young impressionable character. I think part of that is just being more mature.”

— Chris O'Donnell

“Reinvention is the key to surviving this fashion industry. Madonna is the perfect example of reinvention. She has taken something that is so little and turned herself into a legend by simply never staying the same.”

— Janice Dickinson

“I have patches of insomnia, and I'm fascinated by the otherness of the world at night. The stillness. Daytime preoccupations fall away, standards change, thoughts change. It's a canvas for reinvention, I think.”

— Morag Joss

“A chance for total reinvention,”

— Eleanor Catton

“Many people come to reinvention when life changes around them, but people come in all different stripes. I'm oriented to change.”

— Jane Pauley

“What I learned was the quality of continual reinvention.”

— Merrie Spaeth

“It's a new challenge to see how people can change your look. I like words like transformation, reinvention, and chameleon. Because one word I don't like is predictable.”

— Naomi Campbell

“Our party is - we don't have the problems that the other party has. We're not divided. We don't have to worry about, you know, what people are saying on the side or about their affection for the president or - we don't have those problems and we don't have the reinvention convention.”

— David Axelrod

“Now the sun is wide awake, baring its teeth, making the sweat run down people's back. Before it will make its way across the sky and into the waiting arms of the Arabian Sea, so much will have happened: migrations into the city, births, marriages, dowry deaths, illicit love affairs, pay raises, first kisses, bankruptcy filings, traffic accidents, business deals, money changing hands, plant shutdowns, gallery openings, poetry readings, political discussions, evictions. Every event in human history will repeat itself today. Everything that ever happened will happen again today. All if life lived in a day. A day, a day. A silver urn of promise and hope. Another chance. At reinvention, at resurrection, at reincarnation. A day. The least and most of all of our lives.”

— Thrity Umrigar

“Almost overnight, white people have gone from being very powerful to potentially irrelevant. Their future in South Africa is not what many had envisaged, so it involves a lot of reinvention.”

— Damon Galgut

“To avoid becoming chronically unemployed, people need more than platitudes offering sympathy. Career reinvention requires encouragement and guidance.”

— Nina Easton

“The American War of Independence is the expulsion of the intrusive elements, alien to the American essence. If American reality is the reinvention of itself, whatever is found in any way irreducible or unassimilable is not American.”

— Octavio Paz

“I know it's common for old people to complain about the modern moment, and lament the passing of a golden age when children were polite and you could buy a kilo of meat for pennies, but in our case, my boy, I think I am not mistaken when I say that something fundamental has changed about the world in which we live. We have reached a state of constant reinvention. Revolutions have moved off the battlefield and on to home computers.”

— G. Willow Wilson

“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.”

— Andrea Seigel

“The desire for reinvention seems to arise most often when companies hear the siren call of synergy and start to expand beyond their core businesses.”

— James Surowiecki

“AARP knows the future is bright for a generation that's going to remain healthy and vital for 10, 20, 30, 40 more years. AARP has the information and resources people need throughout their process of reinvention.”

— Jane Pauley

“The idea of reinvention has always seemed bizarre to me.”

— Robert Smith

“I think American television changed world television in its reinvention of the series.”

— Julian Fellowes

“Teenagers ultimately don't mind belonging to a group, because there's always the opportunity to eventually become someone new. The elderly, by definition, are running out of opportunities for reinvention.”

— Charles Duhigg

“Urban reinvention is what has been called the "consumer city." The post-World War II years brought about the rise of suburbanization and the creation of the commuter city. People chose suburban life for its amenities and comforts and commuted into the city only for work and the occasional show. But Vancouver and Los Angeles are two urban areas that reversed the trend. They became consumer cities marked by a new phenomenon - the reverse commuter. Increasingly, these and other cities offer residents a quality of life they could not find elsewhere in the region - a dizzying variety of artistic, educational, cultural, and entertainment events and”

— Timothy Keller

“Glam really did plant seeds for a new identity. I think a lot of kids needed that - that sense of reinvention. Kids learned that however crazy you may think it is, there is a place for what you want to do and who you want to be.”

— David Bowie

“I'm a geek who loves fashion. There's been a reinvention of the word geek. It means being passionate about anything that's under the radar or sort of frowned upon, like Comic-Con.”

— Kristen Bell

“Ultimately, I made my range wider because I wanted to suit each publication that I worked for. Talk about reinvention - I'm like the Madonna of photography.”

— Mario Testino

“The BBC came to me and they wanted to adapt the book [Three Musketeers] again, in the straightforward way, and I said no to that. I didn't want to do that. But what I did want to do was have a real look at the adventure genre because I thought it was ripe for reinvention.”

— Adrian Hodges

“Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns is an American masterpiece, a stupendous literary success that channels the social sciences as iconic biography in order to tell a vast story of a people's reinvention of itself and of a nation-the first complete history of the Great Black Migration from start to finish, north, east, west.”

— David Levering Lewis

“Self-reinvention is an essential trope of the American project, closely linked to another such trope: going on the lam. Both are regularly featured in movies and novels and suchlike. Criminals and persons loitering with and without intent hold a crucial place in the culture. For obvious reasons, the culture cannot endorse this behavior, even as it is in thrall to it.”

— Luc Sante

“Positivity is the father of reinvention”

— Josh Stern

“The reinvention of American culture as purely the self catapulted Las Vegas to prominence. The city took sin and made it choice
a sometimes ambiguous choice, but choice nonetheless. Combined with a visionary approach to experience that melded Hollywood and Americans' taste for comfort and self-deception, Las Vegas grew into the last American frontier city, as foreign at times as Prague but as quintessential as Peoria. In Las Vegas, you can choose your fantasy; in the rest of America, you don't always get to pick.”

— Hal Rothman

“Graphic designers should be literate in graphic design history.
Being able to design well is not always enough. Knowing the roots
of design is necessary to avoid reinvention, no less inadvertent plagiarism.”

— Steven Heller

“Yet what is more awesome: to believe that God created everything in six days, or to believe that the biosphere came into being on its own, with no creator, and partially lawlessly? I find the latter proposition so stunning, so worthy of awe and respect, that I am happy to accept this natural creativity in the universe as a reinvention of 'God.'”

— Stuart Kauffman

“There is nothing like a War for the reinvention of lives ...”

— Salman Rushdie

“When an American declares bankruptcy, when he hits bottom, he can reinvent himself. There's a story he can tell. We tolerate reinvention. We encourage reinvention. That's what this country has that Europe does not. It's not just a crisis; it's an opportunity.”

— Michael Lewis

“In C++, reinvention is its own reward.”

— Erik Naggum