Younger Version Of Me Quotes

As for Sadie, she didn’t appear interested in strategy. She leaped from puddle to puddle in her combat boots. She hummed to herself, twirled like a little kid and occasionally pulled random things out of her backpack: wax animal figurines, some string, a piece of chalk, a bright yellow bag of candy. She reminded me of someone … Then it occurred to me. She looked like a younger version of Annabeth, but her fidgeting and hyperness reminded me of … well, me. If Annabeth and I ever had a daughter, she might be a lot like Sadie. Whoa. It’s not like I’d never dreamed about kids before. I mean, you date someone for over a year, the idea is going to be in the back of your mind somewhere, right? But still – I’m barely seventeen. I’m not ready to think too seriously about stuff like that. Also, I’m a demigod. On a day-to-day basis, I’m busy just trying to stay alive. Yet, looking at Sadie, I could imagine that someday maybe I’d have a little girl who looked like Annabeth and acted like me – a cute little hellion of a demigod, stomping through puddles and flattening monsters with magic camels.

To the survivors. I used to blame myself for not doing more. For not leaving earlier. For not pushing back. For not fighting him. Now I am kinder to the younger version of me. Now I believe that survival is enough.

A thin, polished woman walks in. She sticks out immediately in her expensive looking navy dress, shiny bag and shoes that probably cost more than I make in a month. My breath leaves me when I see that her arm is draped around a younger version of herself. That hair, it's pulled back way too tight now, but I'd run my hands through it a thousand times before. That face, now in layer of makeup that makes her look older than I remember, I'd held it in my calloused hands and kissed those lips goodbye over a year ago. She said she'd never see me again and I learned to accept that. She destroyed me, and I'd moved on. No. Not her. She's not from here anymore. I don't know who that person is anymore.

felt like I was somehow mothering my younger self—revisiting each moment, looking at it in a new light and telling that younger version of me that it wasn’t my fault, that I’d done the best I could, that to expect more from me in the absence of support would have been unreasonable.

At that point, Frank seemed to run out of words. There was somebody that he'd reminded me of, as he was spinning out his story and struggling to explain himself. Then I realized: it was myself...when I had desperately tried to talk my way out of something that could never be put right. He was doing the same thing I had done. He was trying to talk his way into absolution. In that moment, I felt overcome by a sense of mercy...for that younger version of myself...Then my mercy swelled, and for just a moment I felt mercy for everyone who has ever gotten involved in an impossibly messy story. All those predicaments that we humans find ourselves in - predicaments that we never see coming, do not know how to handle, and then cannot fix.

Matt’s housekeeper let him in with a grimace. “I’m harmless today,” Tate assured the woman as she led the way to where Matt Holden was standing just outside the study door. “Right. You and two odd species of cobra,” Matt murmured sarcastically, glaring at his son from a tanned face. “What do you want, a bruise to match the other one?” Tate held up both hands. “Don’t start,” he said. Matt moved out of the way with reluctance and closed the study door behind them. “Your mother’s gone shopping,” he said. “Good. I don’t want to talk to her just yet.” Matt’s eyebrows levered up. “Oh?” Tate dropped into the wing chair across from the senator’s bulky armchair. “I need some advice.” Matt felt his forehead. “I didn’t think a single malt whiskey was enough to make me hallucinate,” he said to himself. Tate glowered at him. “You’re not one of my favorite people, but you know Cecily a little better than I seem to lately.” “Cecily loves you,” Matt said shortly, dropping into his chair. “That’s not the problem,” Tate said. He leaned forward, his hands clasped loosely between his splayed knees. “Although I seem to have done everything in my power to make her stop.” The older man didn’t speak for a minute or two. “Love doesn’t die that easily,” he said. “Your mother and I are a case in point. We hadn’t seen each other for thirty-six years, but the instant we met again, the years fell away. We were young again, in love again.” “I can’t wait thirty-six years,” Tate stated. He stared at his hands, then he drew in a long breath. “Cecily’s pregnant.” The other man was quiet for so long that Tate lifted his eyes, only to be met with barely contained rage in the older man’s face. “Is it yours?” Matt asked curtly. Tate glowered at him. “What kind of woman do you think Cecily is? Of course it’s mine!” Matt chuckled. He leaned back in the easy chair and indulged the need to look at his son, to find all the differences and all the similarities in that younger version of his face. It pleased him to find so many familiar things. “We look alike,” Tate said, reading the intent scrutiny he was getting. “Funny that I never noticed that before.” Matt smiled. “We didn’t get along very well.” “Both too stubborn and inflexible,” Tate pointed out. “And arrogant.” Tate chuckled dryly. “Maybe.

I think of all the voices that clatter around in my head, voices that I’m pretty sure are just some older, or younger, or just better versions of me. There have been times— when things have been really bleak— that I’ve tried to summon her, to have her answer me back, but it never works. I just get me. If I want her voice, I have to rely on memories. At least I have plenty of those.

So many women I know feel the same, but we talk about it sotto voce. We avoid conflict, thinking instead that each of us has failed, individually, to fix her life properly, and under the righteous resentment there’s a shame that keeps our voices down. I pretend I am equal while I am: walking the dog/doing the grocery shopping/waiting in the orthodontist’s/commiserating about mean teens/folding laundry. I pretend I am equal when I am chopping vegetables/organising the counsellor or the hospital or the solicitor/de-griming the fridge. Actually, I mind none of it. This is my real life, with my real loves. I know that when I’m old I’ll envy my younger self her busyness, her purpose, her big-hearted whirligig life. But still, the distribution of labour is hard to make equal, because so much of it is hard to see, wrapped up in the definition of what it is to be me. Pretending I am not subject to modern versions of the same forces Eileen was, by ‘practising acceptance’ or ‘just getting on with it’, is a kind of lived insanity: to pretend to be liberated from the work while doing it.

Are you okay, Maggie?” Logan asked, rousing me out of my mind-numbing speculations. Heaving a big sigh, I turned to him and said, “I guess so.” “Are you still worried about visiting your mother?” he asked softly. Nodding, I said, “A little. I’m just so confused about this whole time-space-brain twister thing. And I’m afraid I might say the wrong thing and mess everything up.” I shook my head, trying to make sense of my thoughts. “I mean - what if my younger self should call my mother while I’m there visiting her? Is there really another version of me? Or by coming here from the future, did the younger me cease to exist?

This need for me to settle somewhere, on something. To make some choices about my life. What is the life I've dreamed of? Growing up in America, when I was younger, I didn't see many kids who looked like me in books, in video games, on television. What I did see were stereotypes---good at math, studying, working hard. Narrow versions of myself. Now, my world has expanded. I can have things at the touch of my fingertips. But there are still rules to abide by. Princess rules. What I can do and can't. Like my major. I may choose it but within certain parameters. Does life always come with constraints? Is that part of growing up?

Chang opened the door and checked the hallway. She said, “Let’s go.” She opened the door wider. There was a guy standing there. Eyewitness testimony was suspect because of preconditions, and cognitive bias, and suggestibility. It was suspect because people see what they expect to see. Reacher was no different. He was human. The front part of his brain wasted the first precious split second working on the image of the guy at the door, trying to rearrange it into a plausible version of a theoretical McCann. Which was not an easy mental task, because McCann was supposed to be sixty years old and thin and gaunt, whereas the guy at the door was clearly twenty years younger than that, and twice as solid. But still Reacher tried, instinctively, because who else could it be, but McCann? Who else could be at McCann’s door, in McCann’s building, in McCann’s city? Then half a second later the back part of Reacher’s brain took over, and the image resolved itself, crisp and clear, not a potential McCann at all, not even remotely a contender, but the familiar twice-glimpsed face, now three times seen, first in the diner, next in the Town Car, and finally in the there and then, in a dim upstairs hallway in a three-floor walk-up.

Oedipa spent the next several days in and out of libraries and earnest discussions with Emory Bortz and Genghis Cohen. She feared a little for their security in view of what was happening to everyone else she knew. The day after reading Blobb's Peregrinations she, with Bortz, Grace, and the graduate students, attended Randolph Driblette's burial, listened to a younger brother's helpless, stricken eulogy, watched the mother, spectral in afternoon smog, cry, and came back at night to sit on the grave and drink Napa Valley muscatel, which Driblette in his time had put away barrels of. There was no moon, smog covered the stars, all black as a Tristero rider. Oedipa sat on the earth, ass getting cold, wondering whether, as Driblette had suggested that night from the shower, some version of herself hadn't vanished with him. Perhaps her mind would go on flexing psychic muscles that no longer existed; would be betrayed and mocked by a phantom self as the amputee is by a phantom limb. Someday she might replace whatever of her had gone away by some prosthetic device, a dress of a certain color, a phrase in a ' letter, another lover. She tried to reach out, to whatever coded tenacity of protein might improbably have held on six feet below, still resisting decay-any stubborn quiescence perhaps gathering itself for some last burst, some last scramble up through earth, just-glimmering, holding together with its final strength a transient, winged shape, needing to settle at once in the warm host, or dissipate forever into the dark. If you come to me, prayed Oedipa, bring your memories of the last night. Or if you have to keep down your payload, the last five minutes-that may be enough. But so I'll know if your walk into the sea had anything to do with Tristero. If they got rid of you for the reason they got rid of Hilarius and Mucho and Metzger-maybe because they thought I no longer needed you. They were wrong. I needed you. Only bring me that memory, and you can live with me for whatever time I've got. She remembered his head, floating in the shower, saying, you could fall in love with me. But could she have saved him? She looked over at the girl who'd given her the news of his death. Had they been in love? Did she know why Driblette had put in those two extra lines that night? Had he even known why? No one could begin to trace it. A hundred hangups, permuted, combined-sex, money, illness, despair with the history of his time and place, who knew. Changing the script had no clearer motive than his suicide. There was the same whimsy to both. Perhaps-she felt briefly penetrated, as if the bright winged thing had actually made it to the sanctuary of her heart-perhaps, springing from the same slick labyrinth, adding those two lines had even, in a way never to be explained, served him as a rehearsal for his night's walk away into that vast sink of the primal blood the Pacific. She waited for the winged brightness to announce its safe arrival. But there was silence. Driblette, she called. The signal echoing down twisted miles of brain circuitry. Driblette! But as with Maxwell's Demon, so now. Either she could not communicate, or he did not exist.

She could hear the voice of her childhood, could see a younger version of herself plucking petals off a flower. He loves me; he loves me not. (She) left the petals alone, not ready to hear the answer. The fragrance of the flowers danced around her; and in her mind, or memory, or both, she could hear a song. She closed her eyes, allowing herself to be transported there. He stood in a black suit looking painfully handsome; she wore a green dress wishing he would see her…really see her. It was easy and comfortable. They swayed slowly, lost in the melody, the moment. His hand on her waist, her hand on his shoulder, their fingers clasped tightly together. He loves me; he loves me not.

I've noticed that everything I'm inspired by the most at this stage is very different from what inspired me when I was younger. There's significantly little romance and significantly more depth. At first I was sad and worried about this. I thought there was something emptied or broken with me for a while, that the experiences of life had really damaged that part of me. But I think I've been misunderstanding the purpose of that. Maybe everything is exactly right with me now for what I have to create. And maybe the best and highest art I can ever make will come from this version of myself.

… and while I had been helping Wolfe get the orchids primped up I had been accosted by a tall skinny guy in a pin-check suit, as young as me or younger, wearing a smile that I would recognize if I saw it in Siam—the smile of an elected person who expects to run again, or a novice in training to join the elected person class at the first opportunity. He looked around to make sure no spies were sneaking up on us at the moment, introduced himself as Mr. Whosis, Assistant District Attorney of Crowfield County, and told me at the bottom of his voice, shifting from the smile to Expression 9B, which is used when speaking of the death of a voter, that he would like to have my version of the unfortunate occurrence at the estate of Mr. Pratt the preceding evening. Feeling pestered, I raised my voice instead of lowering it. “District Attorney, huh? Working up a charge of murder against the bull?” That confused him, because he had to show that he appreciated my wit without sacrificing Expression 9B…

Sometimes I wondered if my mother saw me as a reflection of herself. A younger, more American version of her whose sole purpose was to live out her dreams, to achieve more than she’d been able to.

Another, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, suggests I need to change my Facebook photo to something that makes me look younger. I scan an old photo from my First Communion and make it my profile photo. There I am, age eight, wearing my First Communion robe, hands folded in prayer in front of me, looking angelic. “I’m trying to get a promotion at HubSpot,” I write. “The 8-year-old version of me has lots of ideas about how to expand geographically while also driving up MRR by pushing into the enterprise.

You got in a lot of trouble, didn’t you?” I gather, imagining a younger version of Enzo sneaking out at night, drinking liquor straight from the bottle, and slipping through the windows of blushing girls. The last part makes me a little jealous, but I’m not sure if it’s because I didn’t know him then and he wasn’t slipping through my window, or if it’s because I never got to experience things like that growing up. Kevin never allowed me to have friends. He never allowed me to live. “We did,” he says. “Not as much as I would’ve liked, though.” “It sounds mundane.” He hums, a deep, rumbling sound of amusement. “It was, which is exactly why I acted out. Everything is a sin to Catholicism. I was sexually repressed, but considering I refused to conform, I sure as hell wasn’t going to allow them to take pleasure from me, too. I attended confessions more times than I could count. I asked for forgiveness, but I never really wanted it.” I snort. “I bet the nuns loved you,” I tease. “They hated me,” he says with mirth. “Most of them, anyway.

Why art? I know you’re talented, but why not a sports major or something?” “It’s always been a way to say the things I didn’t know how to. Especially when I was younger and I wasn’t as talkative as I am now. Don’t raise your eyebrow at me; this is my version of talkative. Art tells a story; it can change people’s minds or reaffirm their beliefs. I’ve spent my life worrying about saying the wrong thing. I can’t get art wrong.

For me, it’s a kind of philosophical detachment. Not a detachment as in disengagement, but in appreciation of their individuality. Almost paradoxically, when I’m not living my life through them, I feel even closer to them, because it’s not about me—their life is theirs to live—so I can detach from the outcome and drop my expectations. They are not younger versions of me but unique beings in their own right.

The Twenty-Year Rule Let’s stop blaming each other for things that happened more than twenty years ago. Humans change a lot in two decades. If we are lucky enough to mature and learn over time, we become better versions of our younger selves—wiser, less selfish, and more useful. In olden times—let’s say, before the Internet—your mistakes of youth would go unrecorded. The Twenty-Year Rule applied by default in most cases, because no one had an efficient way to check up on your behavior that far back. Now we have social media that creates a total slideshow of every dumbass thing you ever thought or did in your entire life. It turns out that most of us were worse people when we were younger. You wouldn’t want to know the teenage me. But I’d like to think I’ve improved since then. I’ll agree to judge you by your most recent twenty years on this planet if you will extend me the same courtesy.

And she’s still smiling, brighter now, like a much younger version of herself. A version that’s engraved deep inside me. A version that I intend to bring out.

A younger version of Headmistress Carmine was looking right at me from the faded colors of the picture printed on the page. She wasn’t smiling, wasn’t giving any expression as per usual, but it was her, and the man standing next to her was Alan.

This was who The Composer was: A person who did not understand America's basic facts, but wholly and completely understood its deepest feelings, its most powerful fears and desires. And I came to understand that I needed the same things, that the only way to surface from my own panic was to hope it was temporary. To hope that somewhere, in the future, was an older version of myself able to transform disasters into stories. I look at her now, my younger self. She is working so hard at so many things. She's playing the violin underwater and wondering why no one can hear her. She has no idea why she has disaster-brain, no idea why she has lost the ability to know the most basic things about her own body. Still, she teaches me something important: In the midst of panic, something compels her to take a look around, to take note of her surroundings, to remember what she sees.

Handle it how?” asked a third mother. “Amazon Prime?” “We’ll handle it,” repeated Terry. “There are tarps in the toolshed. We’ll be fine.” JEN, IMPRESSED BY Terry’s masterful attitude, consented to hook up with him in the greenhouse that evening (we’d piled a nest of blankets in a corner). Jen was strong but had notoriously low standards, make-out-wise. Not to be outdone, the other two girls and I agreed to play Spin the Bottle with David and Low. Extreme version, oral potentially included. Juicy was fourteen, too immature for us and too much of a slob, and Rafe wasn’t bi. Shame, said Sukey. Rafe is hella good-looking. Then Dee said she wouldn’t play, so it was down to Sukey and me. Dee was afraid of Spin the Bottle, due to being—Sukey alleged—a quiet little mouse and most likely even a mouth virgin. Timid and shy, Dee was also passive-aggressive, neurotic, a germaphobe, and borderline paranoid. According to Sukey. “Suck it up, mousy,” said Sukey. “It’s a teachable moment.” “Why teachable?” asked Dee. Because, said Sukey, she, yours truly, was a master of the one-minute handjob. Dee could pick up some tips. The guys sat straighter when Sukey said that. Their interest became focused and laser-like. But Dee said no, she wasn’t that type. Plus, after this she needed a shower. Val also declined to participate. She left to go climbing in the dark. This was while the parents were playing Texas Hold ’Em and squabbling over alleged card counting—someone’s father had been kicked out of a casino in Las Vegas. The younger kids were fast asleep.

As for that incident in my city, similar things happen all the time. Many versions of it happened to me when I was younger, sometimes involving death threats and often involving torrents of obscenities: a man approaches a woman with both desire and the furious expectation that the desire will likely be rebuffed.  The fury and desire come in a package, all twisted together into something that always threatens to turn eros into thanatos, love into death, sometimes literally.

Had a gentleman on one of my crews this week, he reminded me of my younger self. I was putting the home back together and he was taking it apart. Karma life does not stop once you are successful instead it reintroduces itself through younger versions of you.

What do you think of Lord St. Vincent?” Pandora asked eagerly. West’s gaze moved to a man who appeared to be a younger version of his sire, with bronze-gold hair that gleamed like new-minted coins. Princely handsome. A cross between Adonis and the Royal Coronation Coach. With deliberate casualness, West said, “He’s not as tall as I expected.” Pandora looked affronted. “He’s every bit as tall as you!” “I’ll eat my hat if he’s an inch over four foot seven.” West clicked his tongue in a few disapproving tsk-tsks. “And still in short trousers.” Half annoyed, half amused, Pandora gave him a little shove. “That’s his younger brother Ivo, who is eleven. The one next to him is my fiancé.” “Aah. Well, I can see why you’d want to marry that one.” Folding her arms across her chest, Pandora let out a long sigh. “Yes. But why does he want to marry me?” West took her by the shoulders and turned her to face him. “Why wouldn’t he?” he asked, his voice gentling with concern. “Because I’m not the sort of girl everyone expected him to marry.” “You’re what he wants, or he wouldn’t be here. What is there to fret about?” Pandora shrugged uneasily. “I don’t really deserve him,” she confessed. “How splendid for you.” “Why is that splendid?” “There’s nothing better than having something you don’t deserve. Just say to yourself, ‘Hooray for me, I’m so very lucky. Not only do I have the biggest piece of cake, it’s a corner piece with a sugar-paste flower on top, and everyone else is sick with envy.’” A slow grin spread across Pandora’s face. After a moment, she said in an experimental undertone, “Hooray for me.

It’s a weird thing in Malaysia that almost everybody talks about ‘May 13’, the race riots where about 150 people died and stuff, but these same everybodies never mention that twenty plus years before 1969 the Chinese were hunted down and massacred by the Japanese by the thousands. Even as I’m saying this it remains difficult for younger folks like me to understand the plight of people like my grandparents. This was a mini Asian version of the Holocaust: if the Chinese were caught, they were killed. It’s that simple.