Quotes About Change

time's a goon

Nineteen eighty is almost here, thank God. the hippies are getting old, they blew their brains on acid and now they're begging on street corners all over San Francisco. Their hair is tangled and their bare feet are thick and gray as shoes. We're sick of them.

Suddenly I'm scared. That the solar panels were a time machine. That I'm a grown-up woman coming back to this place after many years. That my parents are gone, and our house isn't ours anymore. It's a broken down ruin with no one in it. Living here all together was so sweet. Even when we fought. It felt like it would never end. I'll always miss it.

our familiar features rinsed in weird adulthood.

A new remote and unfamiliar place can make the prior remote and unfamiliar place seem like home.

I don't know what happened to me," he said, shaking his head. "I honestly don't." ... "You grew up, Alex.

What I'm Afraid Of: [...] That I'm a grown-up woman coming back to this place after many years. That my parents are gone, and our house isn't ours anymore. It's a broken-down ruin with no one in it. Living here all together was so sweet. Even when we fought. It felt like it would never end. I'll always miss it.

The whole fucking world is upside down. Buildings are missing. You get strip-searched everytime you go to someone's office. Everybody sounds stoned, because they're emailing people the whole time they're talking to you. Tom and Nicole are with different people...and now my rock-and-roll sister and her husband are hanging around with Republicans. What the fuck!

Poets claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years.

underneath that I'd said something else: we were both a couple of asswipes, and now only I'm an asswipe; why? And underneath that, something else: once an asswipe, always an asswipe.

Time's a goon, right? Isn't that the expression?

He hungered for a sense of progress, of new things approaching while old familiar ones receded. It seemed far too long since he'd had that sensation.

Time's a goon right? Isn't that the expression?

Only his folks altered with the years, their hair going silver, Robert Sr., a high school football coach , ultimately on oxygen for emphysema, both of them seeming to shrink on the couch cushions in a way that made the crystal and porcelain artifacts look bigger each year.

Sure, everything is ending," Jules said, "but not yet.

People had to do something to shake things up or they would've keeled over from misery and boredom. So Christ came to dinner. Witches and goblins were hiding in corners. People looked at the sky and saw angels. And my idea--my, my...plan, my-- Mick: Mission. He didn't pause in his sanding. My mission is to bring some of that back. Let people be tourists of their own imaginations.

My questions all seem wrong: How did you get so old? Was it all at once, in a day, or did you peter out bit by bit? When did you stop having parties? Did everyone else get old too, or was it just you? Are other people still here, hiding in the palm trees or holding their breath underwater? When did you last swim your laps? Do your bones hurt? Did you know this was coming and hide that you knew, or did it ambush you from behind?

Your desultory twenties," my mother calls my lost time, trying to make it sound reasonable and fun, but it started before I was twenty and lasted much longer. I'm praying it's over.

Nostalgia was the end—everyone knew that.

One thing was certain: Rose had been wrong about the world becoming small again. Or at least it would not be the same small world it had been. Too much had changed. And amid those shifts and realignments, Anna had slipped through a crack and escaped.

Standing under the gray sky among so many women, Anna began to understand the collective grief: Lydia had been a last still point amid so much wrenching change.

After eight years in the same one-bedroom apartment, I was suddenly finding it crowded beyond capacity. There was me. There was my unrecognizable face. And there was someone else. It was neither a child nor an animal. It was Despair.

Then winter ended and spring came, and I thought, even if I don't believe there's a poem in anything anymore, maybe I'll write a story. A lot of people do that when they can't seem to figure out who or what they love. It might be an oversimplification, but they seem to write poetry when they do know.

years. In fact the whole apartment, which six years ago had seemed like a way station to some better place, had ended up solidifying around Sasha, gathering mass and weight, until she felt both mired in it and lucky to have it—as if she not only couldn't move on but didn't want to.