Quotes About Change

One day, after I'm a daffodil, I will be able to photosynthesize. It's something to look forward to.

It is good to remember that the original woman was herself an immigrant. She fell a long way from her home in the Skyward, leaving behind all who knew her and held her dear. She could never go back.

A compass: "To find your new path.

transformation is slow.

We do not pay at the pump for the cost of climate change, for the loss of ecosystem services provided by maples and others. Cheap gas now or maples for the next generation? Call me crazy, but I'd welcome the tax that would resolve that question.

The shape of the water is changed by the moss and the moss is shaped by the water.

The cell membrane undergoes a change that allows it to shrink and collapse without sustaining irreparable damage. Most importantly, the enzymes of cell repair are synthesized and stored for future access.

I wonder how the fabric is changed when the release of daughters tears a hole. Does it heal over quickly, or does the empty space remain? And how do the daughter cells make new connections? How is the fabric rewoven?

The most highly regarded models predict that the climate of New England will become hostile to sugar maples within fifty years.

It is an odd dichotomy we have set for ourselves, between loving people and loving land. We know that loving a person has agency and power—we know it can change everything. Yet we act as if loving the land is an internal affair that has no energy outside the confines of our head and heart.

Perhaps the Skywoman story endures because we too are always falling. Our lives, both personal and collective, share her trajectory. Whether we jump or are pushed, or the edge of the known world just crumbles at our feet, we fall, spinning into someplace new and unexpected. Despite our fears of falling, the gifts of the world stand by to catch us.

The plants adapt, the people adopt.

You don't even realize you're living in a before until you wake up one day and find yourself in an after.

The only thing more dangerous than a willingness to ignore the Law is an ability to change it.

I guess that's the secret. It would never have occurred to Lia to want to escape -- but then she gets kicked out. Best thing that ever happened to her? I'm not sure she would say yes, because obliviousness tends to be rather pleasant, but once you realized you've been bolivious, there's no turning back. You can't un-know what you know. You know?

Things fall apart. But things don't just fall apart. People break them.

If you don't keep pushing the limits, you wake up one day and you're the "center square to block."

We walk through many doors in our lifetime. It is the accumulation of these seemingly minor passages that shape our lives. Most often, it is years after we pass over a threshold before we realize the significance of the moment. That was not the case with the books I read that summer.

Civilization is a transient sickness.

I've changed my ways a little, I cannot now Run with you in the evenings along the shore, Except in a kind of dream, and you, if you dream a moment, You see me there.

Nature knows that people are a tide that swells and in time will ebb, and all their works dissolve ... As for us: We must uncenter our minds from ourselves. We must unhumanize our views a little and become confident as the rock and ocean that we are made from.

Never blame the man: his hard-pressed Ancestors formed him: the other anthropoid apes were safe In the great southern rain-forest and hardly changed In a million years: but the race of man was made By shock and agony… … a wound was made in the brain When life became too hard, and has never healed. It is there that they learned trembling religion and blood- sacrifice, It is there that they learned to butcher beasts and to slaughter men, And hate the world.

It is always easier to destroy a complex system than to selectively alter it.

Until meeting you, I wasn't looking for anything at all. Since meeting you, I'm kind of looking for a girlfriend.