Quotes About Change

You know, nothing ever goes back exactly the way it was. Things just expand and contract. Like the universe, like breathing. But you'll never fill your lungs up with the same air twice. Sometimes, it would be cool if you could pause and rewind and do over. But I think anyone would get tired of that after one or two times.

I suppose the things that transform your life don't appear as you fancifully imagine they will.

It's no wonder I became a monster, too.

Joey told me nothing ever goes back exactly the way it was, that things expand and contract – like breathing, but you could never fill your lungs up with the same air twice.

Joey threw a rock too. "Yep," he said. "You know, nothing ever goes back exactly the way it was. Things just expand and contract. Like the universe, like breathing. But you'll never fill your lungs up with the same air twice. Sometimes, it would be cool if you could pause and rewind and do over. But I think anyone would get tired of that after one or two times.

When you think about it, the universe is nothing but this vast knackery of churning black holes and exploding stars, constantly free atoms that collect together and become something else, and something else again.

You know, nothing ever goes back exactly the way it was. Things just expand and contract. Like the universe, like breathing. But you'll never fill your lungs up with the same air twice. Sometimes, it would be cool if you could pause and rewind and do over. But I think anyone would get tired of that after one or two times.

My own early crusade for same-sex marriage, for example, is now mainstream gay politics. It wasn't when I started.

When I first started talking about gay marriage, most people in the gay community looked at me as if I was insane or possibly a fascist reactionary.

Just like a wine glass breaking, or a car rusting, the entropy of a closed system will always increase with time.

The Bowery station on the J line is what happens to a neighborhood once politicians realize the people who live there don't vote.

Going to prison is pretty common. Coming out a better person than when you went in, that's never been done.

Roots are nice, but a tree can't run.

will be different

Countries rise to power and then fall into triviality.

Each day as I travel through downtown Tucson, I am amazed at how quickly the most ancient of human behaviors have changed. For as long as there have been Homo sapiens - roughly 200 000 years - people have filled their lives principally with two activities: talking directly with other people, and doing physical things.

Authenticity is fluid. Today's innovation is tomorrow's authenticity.

Too many things have changed. Too much time has passed. I'm different now, a man with a pocketful of unconnected but terribly vivid memories. I was looking to dredge up what I'd long forgotten. Most of all, I am wishing for something to fasten all these gems, maybe something to hold them in a continuity that I can comprehend.

I'd realized that the surest way forward was to burn all the bridges behind.

Life is like that; all things come to an end. There are some trees where owls have nested for hundreds of years, and yet at some point they leave it empty, don't return there.

But that was how it had to go, for the death of a rotten tree is always rapid: one violent shake and over it goes. Its broad canopy, which for many years rose up in its place in the forest, has suddenly vanished. For a while there is a space in the forest cover, but soon the space is filled by new growth, as if nothing had happened.

You might almost think that the forest is itself to blame for the people leaving its midst, because it behaves like a conqueror, spreading out in the footsteps of its former master.

There, where mountains tower today, one day there will be seas; there, where today seas surge, will one day be deserts. But stupidity will remain stupidity.

Because I've overcome the vanity and pride of being different. I've understood that they are a pitiful defense against being different. Because I've understood that the sun shines differently when something changes, but I'm not the axis of those changes.