Quotes About Change

I felt an unpleasantness in the air, a pervading harshness that hadn't been there before. Or perhaps I had merely grown used to it, grown to accept West Egg as a world complete in itself, with its own standards and its own great figures, second to nothing because it had no consciousness of being so, and now I was looking at it again, through Daisy's eyes. It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment

I'm going to fix everything just the way it was before,' he said, nodding determinedly. 'She'll see.

She told herself that the years had brought her tolerance—actually they had slain what measure she had ever possessed of moral courage.

Outside the wind was loud and there was a faint flow of thunder along the Sound. All the lights were going on in West Egg now; the electric trains, men-carrying, were plunging home through the rain from New York. It was the hour of a profound human change, and excitement was generating on the air

hard rock or the wet marshes but after a certain point I don't care what it's founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort

You can't re- peat the past." "Can't repeat the past?" he cried incredulously. "Why of course you can!

Sommer ist nur das uneingelöste Versprechen des Frühling.

La vie reprend toujours avec le début de l'été.

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.

bouleversement and was hurrying into line with his generation.

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.

With the influence of the dress her personality had also undergone a change. The intense vitality that had been so remarkable in the garage was converted into impressive hauteur. Her laughter, her gestures, her assertions became more violently affected moment by moment, and as she expanded the room grew smaller around her, until she seemed to be revolving on a noisy, creaking pivot through the smoky air.

I've got one more record, she said. -Have you heard 'So Long, Letty'? I suppose you have. Honestly, you don't understand-I haven't heard a thing. Nor known, nor smelt, nor tasted, he might have added; only hot-cheeked girls in hot secret rooms. The young maidens he had known at New Haven in 1914 kissed men, saying There!, hands at the man's chest to push him away. Now there was this scarcely saved waif of disaster bringing him the essence of a continent....

So we beat on boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

What are you looking at? I was just thinking that you're going to be rather happy. Nicole was frightened: Am I? All right--things couldn't be worse than they have been.

I'm going to start being that. I don't like being twenty-two. I hate it more than anything in the world.

Americans were saying good-by in voices that mimicked the cadence of water running into a large old bathtub.

People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher—a Roosevelt, a Tolstoi, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away.

Il regarda autour de lui avec une brusque violence, comme si le passé était là, tapi dans l'ombre de la maison, mais hors de portée. — Je ferais tout pour que les choses soient comme avant. Exactement comme avant.

Y así seguimos nuestro camino: botes que reman contra la corriente, incesantemente arrastrados hacia el pasado.

There were days when Amory resented that life had changed from an even progress along a road stretching ever in sight, with the scenery merging and blending, into a succession of quick, unrelated scenes...

Es inevitablemente triste mirar con nuevos ojos cosas a las que ya hemos aplicado nuestra propia capacidad de enfoque.

Y así, con la luz del sol y la explosión espléndida de las hojas que crecían en los árboles como crecen las cosas en las películas a cámara rápida, tuve la certeza bien conocida de que la vida vuelve a empezar con el verano.

I don't ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there'll always be the person I am to-night.