Quotes About Change

invite you to think about ways you might introduce risk to safety, mystery to the familiar, and novelty to the enduring.

I got rid of my motorcycle when Jimmy was born. I'm not allowed to die in a bike crash anymore.

Given the transient nature of life, given its ceaseless flux, there is more than a hint of arrogance in the assumption that we can make our relationships permanent, and that security can actually be fixed.

In this setup, the pressure is always on the non-talker to change, rather than on the talker to be more versatile. This situation minimizes the importance of nonverbal communication: doing nice things for each other, making attentive gestures, or sharing projects in a spirit of collaboration.

the rise of individualism, the emergence of consumer culture, and the mandate for happiness have transformed matrimony and its adulterous shadow. Affairs are not what they used to be because marriage is not what it used to be.

Proust, "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes." Adele recalls a moment when she experienced

Sometimes, when we seek the gaze of another, it isn't our partner we are turning away from, but the person we have become. We are not looking for another lover so much as another version of ourselves. Mexican essayist Octavio Paz describes eroticism as a thirst for otherness.1 So often, the most intoxicating other that people discover in the affair is not a new partner; it's a new self.

We live in a culture that continually lures us with the promise of something better, younger, perkier. Hence we no longer divorce because we're unhappy; we divorce because we could be happier.

what is true for human beings is true for every living thing: all organisms require alternating periods of growth and equilibrium. Any person or system exposed to ceaseless novelty and change risks falling into chaos; but one that is too rigid or static ceases to grow and eventually dies.

Falling in love, as Francesco Alberoni writes, "rearranges all our priorities, throws the superfluous overboard, projects a glaring light onto what is superficial and instantly discards it.

I used to think I knew who I was, who he was, and suddenly I don't recognize us, neither him nor me . . . My entire life, as I've led it up to this moment, has crumbled, like in those earthquakes where the very ground devours itself and vanishes beneath your feet while you're making your escape. There is no turning back. —Simone de Beauvoir, The Woman Destroyed

Home, marriage, and motherhood have forever been the pursuit of many women, but also the place where women cease to feel like women.

And what is true for human beings is true for every living thing: all organisms require alternating periods of growth and equilibrium. Any person or system exposed to ceaseless novelty and change risks falling into chaos; but one that is too rigid or static ceases to grow and eventually dies. This never-ending dance between change and stability is like the anchor and the waves.

Today in the West most of us are going to have two or three significant long-term relationships or marriages. And some of us are going to do it with the same person. When a couple comes to me in the aftermath of an affair, I often tell them this: Your first marriage is over. Would you like to create a second one together?

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

As soon as we conform anything to language, we've changed it. Use a word and you've altered the world. The poets know this. It's what they try so hard to avoid.

Grace is the ability to accept change. Be open and supple; the brittle break.

Hello, you've reached the winter of our discontent.

There are only two kinds of Shakespeare productions; ones that change your life, and ones that suck shit. That's it. Because if it doesn't change the audience's life... the production has failed.

They could neither go back nor remain in place. Like their wagons, they had no brakes, no way of stopping the high-stakes journey on which they had wagered their lives and fortunes.

Tamzene Donner was a woman at peace with the vagaries of life: "I am as happy as I can reasonably expect in this changing world.

I really see no other solution than to turn inwards and to root out all the rottenness there. I no longer believe that we can change anything in the world until we first change ourselves. And that seems to me the only lesson to be learned.

You know, sir, this operation is not, in any hands, a hundred percent predictable? Well, I'm an optimist. I didn't know there were any more such animals, said Dr. Courtland. Never think you've seen the last of anything

Welcome! I said—the most dangerous word in the world.