Quotes About Change

It is in the twenties that the actual momentum of life begins to slacken, and it is a simple soul indeed to whom as many things are as significant and meaningful at thirty as at ten years before. At thirty an organ-grinder is a more or less a moth eaten man who grinds an organ - and once he was an organ-grinder! The unmistakable stigma of humanity touches all those impersonal and beautiful things that only youth ever grasps in their impersonal glory.

I didn't realize it, but the days came along one after another, and then two years were gone, and everything was gone, and I was gone.

There used to be two kinds of kisses: First when girls were kissed and deserted; second, when they were engaged. Now there's a third kind, where the man is kissed and deserted. If Mr. Jones of the nineties bragged he'd kissed a girl, everyone knew he was through with her. If Mr. Jones of 1919 brags the same, everyone knows it's because he can't kiss her any more. Given a decent start any girl can beat a man nowadays.

We haven't met for many years, said Daisy, her voice as matter-of-fact as it could ever be. Five years next November. The automatic quality set us all back at least another minute.

If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream.

He wanted to appear suddenly to her in novel and heroic colors. He wanted to stir her from that casualness she showed toward everything except herself.

Possibly it had occurred to him the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. [...] It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.

I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.

So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home.

He wanted to care, and he could not care. For he had gone away and he could never go back anymore. The gates were closed, the sun was down, and there was no beauty left but the gray beauty of steel that withstands all time. Even the grief he could have borne was left behind in the country of youth, of illusion, of the richness of life, where his winter dreams had flourished.

What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon,' cried Daisy, 'and the day after that, and the next thirty years?' 'Don't be morbid,' Jordan said. 'Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.' 'But it's so hot,' insisted Daisy, on the verge of tears, 'And everything's so confused. Let's all go to town!

How different it all was from what you'd planned.

As for Tom, the fact that he had some woman in New York was really less surprising than that he had been depressed by a book. Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart.

Long ago, there was something in me, but now that thing is gone. Now that thing is gone, that thing is gone. I cannot cry. I cannot care. That thing will come back no more.

I never noticed the stars before. I always thought of them as great big diamonds that belonged to some one. Now they frighten me. They make me feel that it was all a dream, all my youth.

Così continuamo a remare, barche contro corrente, risospinti senza posa nel passato.

It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did.

I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

The past--the wild charge at the head of his men up San Juan Hill; the first years of his marriage when he worked late into the summer dusk down in the busy city for young Hildegarde whom he loved; the days before that when he sat smoking far into the night in the gloomy old Button house on Monroe Street with his grandfather-all these had faded like unsubstantial dreams from his mind as though they had never been. He did not remember.

A man does not recover from such jolts-- he becomes a different person and, eventually, the new person finds new things to care about.

It's a funny thing about comin' home. Looks the same, smells the same, feels the same. You'll realize what's changed is you.

Amory thought how it was only the past that seemed strange and unbelievable.

By God, I may be old-fashioned in my ideas, but women run around too much these days to suit me. They meet all kinds of crazy fish.

Poetry is dying first. It'll be absorbed into prose sooner or later.