Quotes About Change

My conviction is that therapy is only successful if it can change this perspective and the thought patterns connected with it. If people genuinely succeed in feeling how they suffered from their parents' behavior as children, they will usually lose their empathy for those parents with hardly any inner conflict at all.

The feminist movement will forfeit none of its strength if it finally admits that mothers also abuse their children. Only the truth, even the most uncomfortable, endows a movement with the strength to change society, not the denial of the truth.

The contents of the unconscious remain unchanged and timeless. It is only as these contents become conscious that change can begin.

You think that would have changed things? The answer is of course, and for a while, and never.

Every year, when you're a child, you become a different person.

Now that I think of it, she looked splendid. I wish I had met her somewhere else. I wish I had appreciated her as she deserved. I wish that everything had gone differently.

Love dies all the time, or at any rate it becomes distracted, overlaid--it might as well be dead.

One stroke of lightning does not have to lead anywhere, but to the next stroke of lightning.

I just believed it easily, the way you might believe and in fact remember that you once had another set of teeth, now vanished but real in spite of that. Until one day, one day when I may even have been in my teens, I knew with a dim sort of hole in my insides that now I didn't believe it anymore.

It seemed to me that everybody ended up in Toronto at least for a little while.

There is a change coming I think in the lives of girls and women. Yes. But it is up to us to make it come. All women have had up till now has been their connection with men. All we have had. No more lives of our own, really, than domestic animals. He shall hold thee, when his passion shall have spent its novel force, a little closer than his dog, a little dearer than his horse. Tennyson wrote that. It's true. Was true. You will want to have children, though.

It was all he could do. To make her see what she was doing, what she was ending, and to punish her if she did so. Nobody would blame him. There might be finagling, there might be bargaining, there would certainly be humbling of herself, but there it was, like a round cold stone in her gullet, like a cannonball. And it would remain there unless she changed her mind entirely. The children stay

Chronic means that it will be permanent but perhaps not constant.

Do you ever think that there used to be more sensible explanations about things than there are now?

I just believed it easily, the way you might believe and in fact remember that you once had another set of teeth, now vanished but real in spite of that. Until one day, one day when I may even have been in my teens, I knew with a dim sort of hole in my insides that now I didn't believe it anymore.

For a long while the past drops away from you easily and it would seem automatically, properly. Its scenes don't vanish so much as become irrelevant. And then there's a switchback, what's been all over and done with sprouting up fresh, wanting attention, even wanting you to do something about it, though it's plain there is not on this earth a thing to be done.

I have been incredibly lucky, he said. Lucky in my life. Oh, I know some people would not say so. They'd say I hadn't stuck with anything, or that I hadn't made any money. They'd say I wasted that time when I was down-and-out. But that's not true. I heard the call, he said, raising his eyebrows, half smiling at himself. Seriously. I did. I heard the call to get out of the box. Out of the got-to-do-something-big box. Out of the ego box.

But when she was finished running away, when she just went on, what would she put in his place?

Una volta ragazze e ragazzi cercavano in ogni modo di apparire donne e uomini fatti, spesso con risultati ridicoli. Ora invece c'erano uomini e donne che cercavano di sembrare ragazzini finché, presumibilmente, un giorno si svegliavano a un passo dalla vecchiaia. (Marrakesh)

Every year, when you're a child, you become a different person.

There is a change coming I think in the lives of girls and women. Yes, but it is up to us to make it come.

She barely notices when I say that I am going on to Toronto to visit my grandparents. Except to remark that they must be really old. Not a word about Alister. Not even a bad word. She would not have forgotten. Just tidied up the scene and put it away in a closet with her former selves. Or maybe she really is a person who can deal recklessly with humiliation.

It occurred to him, and had occurred to him before, that there was after all something to be said for dealing with things the way most people of his age seemed to do. It was sensible perhaps to stop noticing, to believe that this was still the same world they were living in, with some dreadful but curable aberrations, never to understand how the whole arrangement had altered.

Durante mucho tiempo te desprendes del pasado con facilidad y de una forma que parece automática y adecuada. Las escenas del pasado, más que desvanecerse, dejan de tener importancia. Y entonces se produce una brusca vuelta atrás, lo que está acabado y bien acabado resurge de repente, requiere tu atención, incluso que hagas algo al respecto, aunque salte a la vista que no se puede hacer nada.