Quotes About Change

This will come when I can no longer bring children into the world—

nothing in the world is permanent. The only permanent thing is impermanence.

A single moment changes destinies.

She's grabbed onto old traditions-outdated traditions- in the same way I latch onto them now: as a means of survival, as a way to hang on to ghost memories.

And sometimes, God asks us to wrestle with the unfamiliar until it becomes our new familiar. Until we can breathe freely in that new place.

My eyes shifted to the trickling river. Come spring, it would be ten times as wide and just as deep. On and on it went, rushing toward the distant horizon. Like time. Like life. Sometimes gently falling from one pool into the other, other times fast and cascading, and still other times narrowing into a funnel, a torrent of knots and waves.

You are one of the wealthiest women of the city, Gabriella.' I smiled. Because like, two months ago, I was begging Mom to borrow thirty bucks for a sweater. Rich. I could get into that.

It was a strange lightness, a drifting feeling. Zero gravity. I understood that everything that once seemed solid and immovable might just float away. And that this was a truth of life, not an illusion in the grieving mind of a child. Everything that is hard and heavy in your world is made up of billions of molecules in constant motion offering the illusion of permanence. But it all tends toward breaking down and falling away. Some things just go more quickly, more surprisingly, than others.

They don't find peace. It's pure bullshit. When something unspeakable happens, or when you do something unspeakable, it changes you. It takes you apart and reassembles you. You are a Frankenstein of circumstance, and the parts never fit back quite right and the life you live is a stolen one. You don't deserve to walk among the living, and you know it.

Every couple starts off loving each other, don't they? It's how a relationship ends that really defines its nature.

The woman I was seems hopelessly naive. I envy her.

IF YOU REALLY let life take you, if you release control and stop clinging to sameness, you can't imagine the places you'll end up. But most people don't do that. Most people get this death grip on what they know, and the only thing that loosens their grasp is some kind of tragedy.

It's all these choices that we could have made, the things we might have done. We see them with perfect clarity only long after the moment has passed. Just thirty seconds either way, and I wouldn't have this story to tell you. I wouldn't be the same person telling it.

When someone we love dies suddenly and tragically, it's like seeing the curvature of the earth. You always knew it was round, a contained sphere floating in space. But when you see the bend in the horizon line, it changes your perspective on everything else.

People only stay in your life if they want to. So often, they just go away. And there's really nothing you can do.

Energy cannot be created or destroyed. It can only change form.

We are changed by the things we experience. The big things, the small things have their impact and can't be undone. To judge those experiences, to hate the things that have happened to us is to hate who we've become because of them.

Give up, she wanted to tell them. You lost. The world is crap, and no amount of communicating is going to change it.

But there was something more true, more solid about loving someone through change.

First you were the kid, no one taking you seriously. And then, all of a sudden, people much younger were in positions of authority, and you were supposed to listen to them. It was truly weird.

The years grew over that embrace like a vine.

It is not the strongest among us who survive. Nor is it the most intelligent. It is those among us who are the most adaptable to change.

What had amazed him, what amazed him still, even after all these years, was how quickly he'd stepped out of himself. He'd slipped off every convention and moral that had defined him, a great cowl that fell to the floor with the unfastening of a single closure. The person beneath it was someone he barely recognized.

Life is brutal. Naturally, it changes us. Why does that always come as a surprise? The galaxy is in a constant state of change, an explosion, ever moving outward. The planet—shifting, erupting, continents drifting, tsunamis, fires raging. Why do we try to stay the same? We can't.