Quotes About Change

One autumn night, five years before, they had been walking down the street when the leaves were falling, and they came to a place where there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight. They stopped here and turned toward each other. Now it was a cool night with that mysterious excitement in it which comes at the two changes of the year.

A returned battalion of the National Guard paraded through the streets with open ranks for their dead and then stepped down out of romance forever and sold you things over the counters of local stores.

Anything can happen now that we've slid over this bridge, anything at all...

At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.

already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment the center of a group and then excited with triumph glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and color under the constantly changing light.

Maybe we'll have more fun this summer but this particular fun is over. I want it to die violently instead of fading out sentimentally-- that's why I gave this party.

There was something pathetic in his concentration, as if his complacency, more acute than of old, was not enough to him anymore.

I wouldn't ask too much of her,' I ventured. 'You can't change the past.' 'Can't change the past?' he cried incredulously. 'Why of course you can!

I hope you live a life you're proud of. And if you find that you're not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again.

Then I grew up, and the beauty of succulent illusions fell away from me. The fibre of my mind coarsened and my eyes grew miserably keen. Life rose around my island like a sea, and presently I was swimming.

Thirty - the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single people to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair. But there was Jordan beside me, who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age. As we passed over the dark bridge her wan face fell lazily against my coat's shoulder and the formidable stroke of thirty died away with the reassuring pressure of her hand.

I found, moreover, that there was no great literary tradition; there was only the tradition of the eventful death of every literary tradition….

His mind, under the influence of that insidious mildew which eventually forms on all but the few, gave itself up furiously to every indignation of the age.

She was a brave, hopeful woman and she was following her husband somewhere, changing herself to this kind of person or that, without being able to lead him a step out of his path, and sometimes realizing with discouragement how deep in him the guarded secret of her direction lay. And yet an air of luck clung about her, as if she were a token...

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.

to have and to hold, and, in time - let go

By the next autumn she was gay again, gay as ever.

I'm a product of a versatile mind in a restless generation with every reason to throw my mind and pen in with the radicals.

My own face had now assumed a deep tropical burn.

Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever.

Anthony Patch had ceased to be an individual of mental adventure, of curiosity, and had become an individual of bias and prejudice, with a longing to be emotionally undisturbed.

My generation of radicals and breakers-down never found anything to take the place of the old virtues of work and courage and the old graces of courtesy and politeness.

I wouldn't ask too much of her,' I ventured. 'You can't repeat the past.' 'Can't repeat the past?' he cried incredulously. 'Why of course you can!' He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.

Y así vamos adelante, botes que reman contra la corriente, incesantemente arrastrados hacia el pasado.