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MITCHELL: Can people change? I don’t know. People are who they are—give or take… fifteen percent. That’s how much people can change, if they really want to. Whether it’s for themselves or for the people they love. Yeah, at fifteen percent. But you know what? Sometimes, that’s just enough.

— Steven Levitan, “Fifteen Percent” (Season 1, Episode 13), Modern Family

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CLAIRE: Sometimes I just think my job is to make sure you guys don’t fall on your faces.

PHIL: That’s a hard job in the Dunphy house. We fall a lot.

CLAIRE: I know!

PHIL: Maybe your real job is to be the person who picks us back up. Nobody does that better than you.

— Danny Zuker, “Strangers on a Treadmill” (Season 2, Episode 4), Modern Family

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CAMERON: There are dreamers and there are realists in this world. You’d think the dreamers would find the dreamers and the realists would find the realists, but more often than not, the opposite is true. […] You see, the dreamers need the realists to keep them from soaring too close to the sun. And the realists? Well, without the dreamers, they might not ever get off the ground.

— Ben Karlin, “Punkin Chunkin” (Season 3, Episode 9), Modern Family

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MITCHELL: People can surprise you. You get used to thinking of them one way—stuck in their roles, they are what they are—and then they do something that shows you there’s all this depth and dimension that you never knew existed.

— Steven Levitan and Jeffrey Richman, “Boys’ Night” (Season 2, Episode 18), Modern Family