Quotes About Change

All migrants leave their pasts behind, although some try to pack it into bundles and boxes-but on the journey something seeps out of the treasured mementoes and old photographs, until even their owners fail to recognize them, because it is the fate of migrants to be stripped of history, to stand naked amidst the scorn of strangers upon whom they see rich clothing, the brocades of continuity and the eyebrows of belonging..

My heart broke open and history fell in.

Any story worth its salt can handle a little shaking up.

Roots, I sometimes think, are a conservative myth, designed to keep us in our places.

The process of revision should be constant and endless

The point is always reached after which the gods no longer share their lives with mortal men and women, they die or wither away or retire... Now that they've gone, the high drama's over. What remains is ordinary human life.

I must finish what I've started, even if, inevitably, what I finish turns out not to be what I began.

I have been so-many too-many persons; life, unlike syntax, allows one more than three.

This is not what I had planned; but perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.

She dreamed of him, his face, filling the dream. Things are ending, he told her. This civilization; things are closing in on it. It has been quite a culture, brilliant and foul, cannibal and Christian, the glory of the world. We should celebrate it while we can; until night falls. She didn't agree, not even in the dream, but she knew, as she dreamed, that there was no point telling him now.

The adult chops down his childhood to help his grown-up self. The unsentimentality is appealing, don't you think?

Then a strange moment came, a moment of the kind that determines the fate of nations, because when a crowd loses its fear of an army the world changes.

Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, to rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless.

Maybe I should go home. I miss Bombay. But the Bombay I miss isn't there to go home to anymore. This is who we are. We sail away from the place we love and then because we aren't there to love it people go with axes and burning torches and smash and burn and then we say, Oh, too sad. But we abandoned it, left it to our barbarian successors to destroy.

The old man has always believed in the mutability of things; has known that no matter how solid the ground beneath your feet may seem, it can, at any moment, turn into quicksand and suck you down. Always be prepared.

?ôi khi núi non ph?i ??i d?i ?? c? nhân ???c tái ngá»™.

And my grandfather... was forever knocked into that middle place, unable to worship a God in whose existence he could not wholly disbelieve. Permanent alteration: a hole.

The future, even when it was only a question-shrouded glimmer, would not be eclipsed by the past; even when death moved towards the centre of the stage, life went on fighting for equal rights.

The ancient wisdoms are modern nonsenses. Live in your own time, use what we know, and as you grow up, perhaps the human race will finally grow up with you and put aside childish things.

The system is corrupt, a young man on a bicycle shouted, and if it cannot be changed it must be destroyed. The mastodon revolution is here and you must all choose which side of history you want to be on.

When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy.

If we can cease envisaging ourselves as metaphorical foetuses, and substitute the image of a newborn child, then that will be at least a small intellectual advance. In time, perhaps, we may even learn to toddle.

If you live in the twentieth century you do not find it hard to see yourself in those, more desperate than yourself, who seek to shape it to their will.

In my family we've always found the world's air hard to breathe; we arrive hoping for somewhere better.