Quotes About Change

Women, as we know, used to be judged incapable of medicine. That changed in 1876, when, after a tenacious fight led by Britain's first female doctor, Elizabeth Garret Anderson, the law was changed to prohibit women's exclusion from medical schools. Now, more than 140 years later, female medical students outnumber men. Yet, according to Lawson, our predisposition to avoid antisocial hours and put family before career means we are more

It's a total lie to say there's only one person you're going to be with for the rest of your life. If you're lucky - and if you try really hard - there will always be more than one.

It's strange,' he said, 'that you always changed everything and I changed nothing and yet we've both ended up in the same place.

when people freed themselves they usually forced change on everyone else. In fact, the first thing people sometimes did with their freedom was to find another version of the thing that had imprisoned them. Not changing, in other words, deprived them of what they'd gone to such trouble to attain (freedom).

It was an interesting thought, that stability might be seen as the product of risk; it was perhaps when people tried to keep things the same that the process of decline began.

Fear is a habit like any other, and habits kill what is essential in ourselves.

The world is constantly evolving, while the family endeavours to stay the same. Updated, refurbished, modernised, but essentially the same. A house in the landscape, both shelter and prison.

A visit to the cinema is no longer that: it is less, a tarnished thing, an alloyed pleasure.

but personally, he could never be anywhere without sooner or later wanting to go somewhere else... Likewise he had never been able to build anything permanent with other human beings.

It seems success takes you away from what you know, he said, while failure condemns you to it.

There's a certain point in life at which you realise it's no longer interesting that time goes forward - or rather, that its forward-going-ness has been the central plank of life's illusion, and that while you were waiting to see what was going to happen next, you were steadily being robbed of all you had.

loss of control held new possibilities for me, as though it were itself a kind of freedom.

Change is also loss

I said I wasn't sure it mattered where people lived or how, since their individual nature would create its own circumstances: it was a risky kind of presumption, I said, to rewrite your own fate by changing its setting; when it happened to people against their will, the loss of the known world---whatever its features---was catastrophic.

It had been, in other words, our family home, and I had stayed to watch it become the grave of something I could no longer definitively call either a reality or an illusion.

There's a certain point in life at which you realise it's no longer interesting that time goes forward – or rather, that its forward-going-ness has been the central plank of life's illusion, and that while you were waiting to see what was going to happen next, you were steadily being robbed of all you had.

I said I wasn't sure: when people freed themselves they usually forced change on everyone else. But it didn't necessarily follow that to stay free was to stay the same. In fact, the first thing people sometimes did with their freedom was to find another version of the thing that had imprisoned them. Not changing, in other words, deprived them of what they'd gone to such trouble to attain.

History goes over the top like a steamroller, she said, crushing everything in its path, whereas childhood kills the roots. And that is the poison, she said, that seeps into the soil.

I]t has struck me that along with all other losses, I might lose friendship, too. I am not equal anymore to the people that I know, and what is friendship but a celebration of equality?

realised too that she would never have known this happiness had she not gone through the unhappiness that preceded it, in precisely the way that she did.

I said that I lived in London, having very recently moved from the house in the countryside where I had lived alone with my children for the past three years, and where for the seven years before that we had lived together with their father. It had been, in other words, our family home, and I had stayed to watch it become the grave of something I could no longer definitively call either a reality or an illusion.

And it was the same with my first wife and me,' he said. 'We hit a bump in the road, and over we went.' It had, he now realised, been a happy relationship, the most harmonious of his life. He and his wife had met and got engaged as teenagers; they had never argued, until the argument in which everything between them was broken.

It was nearly thirty years since his first marriage ended, and the further he got from that life, the more real it became to him. Or not real exactly, he said – what had happened since had been real enough. The word he was looking for was authentic: his first marriage had been authentic in a way that nothing ever had again. The older he got, the more it represented to him a kind of home, a place to which he yearned to return.

Leaving things behind and starting again is a way of coping with difficulties. I learnt very early in my life that I was able to leave a place and still remain myself.