Best 11 quotes in «turning points quotes» category

I predict that in the years ahead Enron, not Sept. 11, will come to be seen as the greater turning point in U.S. society.

How often it is a small, almost unconscious event that makes a turning point.

The turning point in history will be the moment man becomes aware that the only god of man is man himself.

The Palestinian election is something that was really a turning point. It's a mandate for peace.

... unless you made your life a turning point, there was no reason for existing.

The turning point in the life of those who succeed usually comes at the moment of some crisis.

When the history of African development is written, it will be clear that a turning point involved the empowerment of women.

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?

...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.

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?

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.