Quotes About Change

His mother had survived decades of marriage to his angry, disappointed, alcoholic father by developing what she called a "forgettery" instead of a memory. She woke up every day and forgot the day before. He, too, seemed to lack a memory for trouble, and woke up remembering only what he yearned for. But he did not act upon his yearning. She had left for America and that was for the best.

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

When he was young, he told her, each phase of his life, each self he tried on, had seemed reassuringly temporary. Its imperfections didn't matter, because he could easily replace one moment by the next, one Saladin by another.

It's as if we're standing still and the world is traveling past us. Or maybe the world is TV and I don't know who's in charge of the zapper.

Some migrants are happy to depart.

We are other than what we would have been if we had crossed the oceans, if or mothers and fathers had not crossed the skies in search of work and dignity and a better life for their children. We have been made again: but I say that we shall also be the ones to remake this society, to shape it from the bottom to the top.

Your whole picture of the world broke, he said, and you felt like you had gone mad. Yes. And I didn't even notice. Boys. They notice nothing.

To be born again, first you have to die.

This is how history moves; the obsession of one moment is relegated to the junkyard of oblivion by the next.

And because the stories were held here in fluid form, they retained the ability to change, to become new versions of themselves, to join up with other stories and so become yet other stories; so that unlike a library of books, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was much more than a storeroom of yarns. It was not dead but alive.

Metamorphosis, this is what I need to explain to her, is what supplants our need for the divine. This is what we can perform, our human magic

She let herself go physically: That has to be said. She became--there is not a polite way of putting this--blowsy. She sagged; for all her good works, her body became the emblem and manifestation of her grief.

Yet I myself am a discontinuous being, not what I was meant to be, no longer what I was.

Quichotte when young had been a little short, a little chubby compared to other boys his age. Then, in late adolescence, as if an invisible divine hand had grabbed him and squeezed him in the middle like a tube of toothpaste, he shot up to his present height and became as skinny as a shadow.

But the truth was that she still felt the past moving like a thrombosis in the blood. It might reach her heart and kill her one of these days.

Once, I belonged to the future. The beloved future of my beloved mother, that was what counted; the present was a means, and the past no more than a dull shard of pottery, a bottle dug up by my father on the beach. Now, however, I belong to yesterday. Is that a line from a song? I forget. Is it?

When people start talking about a golden age," he said, "they always think a new world has begun which will last forever. But the truth about these so-called golden ages is that they never last very long. A few years, maybe. There's always trouble ahead.

It seemed that digression was the true principle of the universe, that the only real subject was the way the subject kept changing.

Any new idea is asked two questions. The first is asked when it's weak: What kind of an idea are you? Are you the kind the compromises, does deals, accommodates itself to society? Aims to find a niche to survive? Or are you the cursed, bloody-minded ram rod type of damn fool notion that would rather break than sway with the breeze? The kind, that almost certainly, ninety-nine times out of a hundred , be smashed to bits, but the hundredth time will change the world?

It was on the Wednesday after the great storm that Mr. Geronimo first noticed that his feet no longer touched the ground.

In a time of constant transformation, beatitude is the joy that comes with belief, with certainty.

Saladin had been seized by the melancholy notion that the garden had been a better place before he knew its names, that something had been lost which he would never be able to regain.

He had been reborn into the knowledge of death; and the inescapability of change, of things-never-the-same, of no-way-back, made him afraid. When you lose the past you're naked in front of contemptuous Azraeel, the death-angel. Hold on if you can, he told himself. Cling to yesterdays. Leave your nail-marks in the grey slope as you slide.

After August 1958, the world continued to spin; but the world of my childhood had, indeed, come to an end. Padma—did you have, when you were little, a world of your own? A tin orb on which were imprinted the continents and oceans and polar ice? Two cheap metal hemispheres, clamped together by a plastic stand? No, of course not; but I did.