Quotes About Change

A week ago, it all seemed so secure. So settled.

For Winkler each hour was another hour between Cleveland and Anchorage, between who they were becoming and who they had been.

He checked the barometer he'd nailed to the family room wall: the pressure was rising.

tang in the back of his throat and he bites back tears. Each morning comes along 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.

The things that look fixed in this 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. From the perspective of God, cities like this come and go like anthills.

And to Marie Laure this is a double cruelty: that everything else keeps living, that the spinning earth does not pause for even an instant in its trip around the sun.

Why can't healing happen as quickly as wounding? You twist an ankle, break a bone—you can be hurt in a heartbeat. Hour by hour, week by week, year by year, the cells in your body labor to remake themselves the way they were the instant before your injury. But even then you're never the same: not quite.

Over time his images of the baby, like photographs handled too often, had worn down and creased, lost their definition.

Another hour, another day, another year. Lump of carbon no larger than a chestnut. Mantled with algae, bedecked with barnacles. Crawled over by snails. It stirs among the pebbles.

A person can get up and leave her life. The world is that big.

Aethon: Lived 80 Years a Man, 1 Year a Donkey, 1 Year a Sea Bass, 1 Year a Crow.

All her life she has been led to believe that she is a child born at the end of things: the empire, the era, the reign of men on earth.

How wonderful it is to by my age - our age - and learn you were wrong about such a fundamental thing.

Casi todas las especies que han existido alguna vez se han extinguido en el presente. No hay ningún motivo para pensar que con la raza humana vaya a ocurrir algo distinto.

Every process must by law decay.

Though perhaps what has changed are the eyes that see it

as if the imminent could not wait to become the past, or the present lunged at the future, eager for what would be.

Each time he returned, he looked slightly different, not merely older, but changed: a new accent, the cigarettes, three sharp knocks on the door. It was as if the city was entering his body and remaking it; he'd look at the low dark houses and wandering hens and farmers with their rope belts as if at film from another century.

We are dust only after all our water evaporates.

What a thing, half bird, half lizard, part one thing, part another, trapped forever between more perfect states.

Every second, walking those two hundred meters, is like leaping into very cold water, in that first instant when the body goes into shock, and everything you are, everything you call your life, disintegrates for an instant, and all you have around you is the water and the cold, your heart trying to send splinters through a block of ice.

Did time move forward, through people, or did people move forward through it, like clouds across the sky?

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

What the war did to dreamers.