Quotes About Change

Memory gallops, then checks up and veers unexpectedly; to memory, the order of occurrence is arbitrary. Winkler was still on an airplane, hurtling north, but he was also pushing farther back, sinking deeper into the overlaps, to the years before he even had a daughter, before he had even dreamed of the woman who would become his wife.

Nearly every species that has ever lived has gone extinct, Laurette. No reason to think we humans will be any different!" Dr. Geffard pronounces this almost gleefully and pours wine into his glass, and she imagines his head as a cabinet filled with ten thousand little drawers.

Maybe...a person can experience an illness as a kind of health. Maybe not every disease is a deficit, a taking away. Maybe what's happening to her is an opening, a window, a migration.

Nearly every species that has ever lived has gone extinct, Laurette. No reason to think we humans will be any different!

How can one country make another change its clocks? What if everybody refuses?" "Then a lot of people will be early. Or late.

and you assume it will be similar enough to the previous one—that you will be safe, that your family will be alive, that you will be together, that life will remain mostly as it was. Then a moment arrives and everything changes.

This is not real suffering, she tells herself. this is only a matter of reprogramming her picture of the future. Of understanding that the line of descendancy is not continuous but arbitrary.

Between whatever has happened already and whatever is to come hovers an invisible borderland, the known on one side and the unknown on the other.

that a thousand choices were implicit in a single moment.

Does she grieve over his absence? Or has she calcified her feelings, protected herself, as he is learning to do?

Water was a wild, capricious substance: nothing solid, nothing permanent, nothing as it appeared.

These were the beginnings of a new existence; Winkler could feel it gestating.

The year swung past the fulcrum of another equinox.

Artillery has stopped for the moment, and the predawn fires inside the walls take on a steady middle life, an adulthood.

Nearly every species that has ever lived has gone extinct, Laurette. No reason to think we humans will be any different!" Dr. Geffard pronounces

We all grew up before we we're grown up.

Nearly every species that has ever lived has gone extinct

The afternoon is bright enough, but Berlin seems not to want to accept the sunlight, as though its buildings have become gloomier and dirtier and more splotchy int he months since he last visited. Though perhaps what has changed are the eyes that see it.

Gone or resolved to go; is there much difference?

They look like scarecrows shipping west to be staked in some terrible garden.

Life can turn out a million ways. - Pg. 82

The things that look fixed in the world, child - mountains, wealth, empires - their permanence is only an illusion. We believe they will last, but that is only because of the brevity of our own lives.

Out in the forsaken city, every other structure, it seems, is burning or collapsing, but here in front of him is the inverse in miniature: the city remains, but the house he occupies is gone.

How can one country make another change its clocks? What if everybody refuses?