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

Shannon L. Alder Actions Advice Applied Lessons Applying Band Aids Better Than Prozac Blatant Brutal Truth Choices Cold Reality Consequences Downplaying Eggshells Faster Therapy Fighting For Truth Freedom Gentleness Good Advice Group Therapy Half Truths Helping One Anothers Honesty Humility Interventions Keeping It Real Knowing Learned Lessons From Others Learning Life Changing Life Coach Living Reality Openess Overcoming Ego Protective Family Protective Friends Realism Reality Right As Rain Rules Work Say It Like It Is Self Respect Similar Paths Slapping Sense Into Loved Ones Staying Positive Stayingpositiveu Com Sugar Coated Swallowing Pride Teachers Tipping Points Tough Love Truth Turning Points Understanding Values Waking Up Friends White Path Wisdom Your Not Alone

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

Kazuo Ishiguro Hindsight Important Past Turning Points Wistful

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

Kazuo Ishiguro Hindsight Past Reflection Reflective Regrets Retrospect Turning Points

...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

Jack Kerouac Adventure American Culture American Literature Growing Up Haunted Homesick Life Experience Lost Soul Quest For Meaning Road Trip Self Discovery Shadow Self Strange Moment Traveling Turning Points Who Am I

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

Shannon L. Alder Best Life Careers Decisions False Gratitude Fear Freedom Inaction Jobs Low Self Esteem Marriage Mistakes Misunderstandings Roads Satan Scared Settling Tempt Turning Points

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

Jan-Philipp Sendker Life Changing Events Transformation Turning Points