Quotes About Change

Only by facing my sin could God use it to change me for the better. The Bible warns that God's discipline isn't pleasant, but in the end the changes God produces in our character are worth it.

We're Western individualists who like technological and sociological change," I observed. "Traditions don't mean as much to us.

You never like it to happen, for something as hopeful and sudden as a January thaw to come to an end, but end it does, and then you want to have some quilts around.

You can embark on new and steeper versions of your old sin, you know, and cry tears doing it that are genuine as any.

You can't explain grace, anyway, especially when it arrives almost despite yourself. I didn't even ask for it, yet somehow it breached and began to work.

But the ruinous thing about growing up is that we stop creating mysteries where none exist, and worse, we usually try to deconstruct and deny the genuine mysteries that remain. We argue against God, against true romance, against loyalty and self-sacrifice.

My weary old ground was broken and watered, and what sprang up was a generalized longing.

You know how it is—you grow up with a story all your life, it can transmute into something you neither question nor particularly value. It's why we have such bad luck learning from mistakes.

People fear miracles because they fear being changed—though ignoring them will change you also.

Good advice is a wise man's friend, of course; but sometimes it just flies on past, and all you can do is wave.

My sister, Swede, who often sees to the nub, offered this: People fear miracles because they fear being changed—though ignoring them will change you also.

I just liked it better when Mr. Andreeson was the enemy, I complained finally.

Most of my books are set in the American Midwest, where I have always lived. Midwesterners are lovely, down-to-earth people. The luxury of choosing this region as a setting is the endless supply of seasonal change images that accompany it; in addition to, the wide variety of settings, urban and rural, to choose from.

I've come down in the world. I've slid to a place where the ceiling is low and there isn't much room for me to move.Most of the time I'm good. I accepted my sentence and do not brood or look back. But sometimes a shift makes me remember. Routine is ruffled and a new start makes me suddenly conscious of what I've become -

Who would care if I became pregnant, who would be scandalized? Aunty Eva, Anwar's flatmates. Omar would never know unless I wrote to him. Uncle Saleh was across the world. A few years back, getting pregnant would have shocked Khartoum society, given my father a heart attack, dealt a blow ti my mother's marriage, and mild, modern Omar, instead of beating me, would called me a slut. And now nothing, no one. This empty space was called freedom.

And why is it that so many years later it is so easy to distinguish the bullies from their prey? Adult bodies surrounding the children of long ago. The years have changed nothing.

A conservative is one who admires radicals centuries after they're dead.

Generally speaking, in pre-modern times you had an idealistic tradition, which was political, and a hedonisic tradition, which was non-political. Now in the 17th century a merger of these two traditions takes place, a political hedonism. And that is one of the greatest changes which has ever happened, and of course up to the present day this determines, with many modifications, that would lead us too far.

All political action aims at either preservation or change. When desiring to preserve, we wish to prevent a change for the worse; when desiring to change, we wish to bring about something better. All political action is then guided by some thought of better or worse.

The crisis of liberalism is a crisis due to the fact that it has abandoned its absolutist basis and is trying to become entirely relativistic.

Everything is relative in this world, where change alone endures.

Old age is the most unexpected of all things that can happen to a man.

Generally speaking, by the way, that is the moral of the opponents of violence in politics: they renounce violence when it comes to introducing changes in what already exists, but in defense of the existing order they will not stop at the most ruthless acts.

You are pitiful, isolated individuals! You are bankrupts. Your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on – into the dustbin of history!