Turning Points Quotes

“Sometimes the course of our lives depends on what we do or don't do in a few seconds, a heartbeat, when we either seize the opportunity, or just miss it. Miss the moment and you never get a chance again.”
― Aidan Chambers, Dying to Know You

“In any case, while it is all very well to talk of 'turning points', one can surely only recognise such moments in retrospect. Naturally, when one looks back to such instances today, they may indeed take the appearance of being crucial, precious moments in one's life; but of course, at the time, this was not the impression one had. Rather, it was as though one had available a never-ending number of days, months, years in which to sort out the vagaries of one's relationship with Miss Kenton; an infinite number of further opportunities in which to remedy the effect of this or that misunderstanding. There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

“Naturally—and why should I not admit this—I have occasionally wondered to myself how things might have turned out in the long run.... I only speculate this now because in the light of subsequent events, it could well be argued that in making my decision...I was perhaps not entirely aware of the full implications of what I was doing. Indeed, it might even be said that this small decision of mine constituted something of a key turning point; that that decision set things on an inevitable course towards what eventually happened.

But then, I suppose, when with the benefit of hindsight one begins to search one's past for such 'turning points', one is apt to start seeing them everywhere.... What would have transpired, one may ask, had one responded slightly differently...? And perhaps—occurring as it did around the same time as these events?”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

“Tough love and brutal truth from strangers are far more valuable than Band-Aids and half-truths from invested friends, who don’t want to see you suffer any more than you have.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“Satan will tempt you with many things in life, but the most powerful is the temptation to be grateful for what you have, when it is not the best life God had to offer you.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“...that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was—I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I’d never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn’t scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that’s why it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon.”
― Jack Kerouac

“So often there are crossroads in your life, when things can go right or horribly wrong. We never know when something we say or do will turn a person's life around.”
― Lesley Crewe, Amazing Grace

“And so there must be in life something like a catastrophic turning point, when the world as we know it ceases to exist. A moment that transforms us into a different person from one heartbeat to the next. The moment when a lover confesses that there's someone else and that he's leaving. Or the day we bury a father or mother or best friend. Or the moment when the doctor informs us of a malignant brain tumor.

Or are such moments merely the dramatic conclusions of lengthier processes, conclusions we could have foreseen if we had only read the portents rather than disregarding them?

And if these turning points are real, are we aware of them as they happen, or do we recognize the discontinuity only much later, in hindsight?”
― Jan-Philipp Sendker, The Art of Hearing Heartbeats

“Destiny is never clear when it arrives. Sometimes we just refuse to do what we no longer feel good about doing. These moments are mysteries in our lives, but we know everything will change.”
― Oliver Stone, Chasing The Light: Writing, Directing, and Surviving Platoon, Midnight Express, Scarface, Salvador, and the Movie Game

“When we open our eyes to the little miraculous events all around us, life becomes a story of many little resurrections, one after the next.”
― Laurie E. Smith, Spirit In Disguise: A Guide to Miraculous Living, Book 2

“Sometimes it’s nice to assign something external with meaning that marks it as a big turning point. Something poetic, like a storm.”
― A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo

“The more we are willing to release all that is holding us back from accepting a higher, loving power into our lives, the more we become available to experience true miracles everyday.”
― Laurie E. Smith, Spirit In Disguise: A Guide to Miraculous Living, Book 2

“Things that don't turn out the way you want are disguised to be the best turning points of your life.”
― Hiral Nagda