Quotes About Change

It feels like I went right from pubescent to senior citizen. But what are you going to do? I'm lucky I caught myself. I might have ended up the only man in the rest home who still thought Jack Kerouac was cool.

Maybe the reason you can never go home again is that, once you're back, you can never leave...

Just wanting Nora- wanting something that wasn't a drug- was such a novelty, such a world-changingly unlikely circumstance, I was afraid to breathe for fear it would all turn out to be some near-death hallucination.

The old Hollywood I knew is dead. It only exists now in still photographs and a few people's memories." — Olivia de Havilland

All cats are the same in the dark, says the proverb. But it certainly did not apply to people, with them it was just the opposite. During the day they were all alike, running in their well-defined ways. At night they changed beyond recognition.

In a garden, things grow . . . but first, they must wither; trees have to lose their leaves in order to put forth new leaves, and to grow thicker and stronger and taller. Some trees die, but fresh saplings replace them. Gardens need a lot of care. But if you love your garden, you don't mind working in it, and waiting. Then in the proper season you will surely see it flourish.

Growth has its season. There are spring and summer, but there are also fall and winter. And then spring and summer again. As long as the roots are not severed, all is well and all be well.

An idea which needs rifles to survive dies of its own accord.

No treballi tant, senyor secretari, deixi la paperassa i vingui a finestrejar. Guaiti, fixi's en aqueixa noia tan bonica que travessa la plaça. No badi, cregui'm, això dura poc. En un tres i no res, passem d'embrions incerts a calaveres atònites.

Cuando empezó a meterse de cabeza en la revolución, yo entendí lo que nos esperaba para siempre

Small-town kids are pebbles in a river, pushed around by the flow, forming pockets and piles, reforming when the current picks up and we find ourselves in a whole new cluster.

It's possible, when you've been married for twenty-five or thirty years, when your children have grown up and moved away, to keep coming back across the tail ends of conversations you started in a different decade, and to realize that whole areas of existence have lain dormant all that time, like seeds in an envelope. There's nothing unusual about that.

Faithfulness to the past can be a kind of death above ground. Writing of the past is a resurrection the past then lives in your words and you are free.

If you want a baby, have a new one. Don't baby the old one.

First, he says, you have to go out into the world. This is not a simple matter of going outside one's door. No, that is simply going out. That's what one does when one is on the way to the store to buy a loaf of bread, some cheese, and a bottle of wine. When one goes out into the world, one is shedding preconceptions of past paths and ideas of past paths, and trying to move freely through an unsubstantiated and new geography.

You live your life, you try to live compassionately, and that's the end of it. You do a little more than you should have to in order to be a good person, but you don't go making big changes in the world, trying to fix things. It presumes too much to do so. There's only this: if everyone acts quietly, compassionately, things will go a little better than they would have otherwise. But people will still suffer.

You aren't the thing that needs to change. It's that you are overcome by your situation, by the way the world has descended on you. There is much in you that is young and new – and not just in you. In any person, even the oldest conceivable person. That's what it means to be living – to engage with the cacophony of objects.

Being old is being useless, and having things be useless to you. Because: the world is what is still to come. It isn't what is or what was.

That's the trouble with the hospital-they find all the things that have been killing you forever, and that you are okay with, you're okay with those things slowly killing you, but then they find them and get rid of them, and then other things replace the things you were fine with, and you are not fine, not fine at all with the new things, and so you die, slowly, in utter misery, just the way you would have before, only before you were pretty okay with the manner of it, but now you're not.

Why had he done it? It had been an idea of the morning—morning ideas were always flawed. They never take into account the accretion of weariness and grief that the late day brings.

We are the wreck of what we have been, and the place of our own future demise,

For where he had been the largeness of her life, now his loss was; his loss was, and the worth of what he had been: those two things together became the core

Your life has been made up of chambers, a series of chambers, so the interlocutor said, his hand on my arm — and in each chamber it is difficult to remember exactly what it was like to be in the previous room. You can remember that certain things happened when you were a child. But, what it was like to be there, to be a child, it really is lost to you. Our world is a difficult succession of losses, vaguely remembered, vaguely enshrined.

I've heard it said that hope is like a blueprint. Hope is what faith uses to create what you want. Hope is more than wanting change or wishing for change. Hope prepares our heart to want to change, and to use our faith to make change happen.