Quotes About Change

meant to give a new impulse to the race—to rouse human creatures to new moods, to thrust them into places where they see new things. Men and women are being dragged out of their self-absorbed corners and stirred up and shaken.

Perhaps when her eyes closed the sultriness of the night had changed to the momentary freshness of the turning dawn

So taking it, she stood among the dried, withered things and looked in tender regret at them.

Earlier that spring, in an Amazon discussion of the comments women get for being fat or losing weight, Lindsay observed that "Nobody who gets thin gets rid of their problems, they just trade them in." The only part she got wrong is that we trade in a few problems (like airplane seats), keep the oldest ones (why we got fat, how being fat has shaped our psyches), and receive a handful of new ones in return.

They all agree, Italy is not what it used to be. What is? All my adult life I've heard how Silicon Valley used to be all orchards, how Atlanta used to be genteel, how publishing used to be run by gentlemen, how houses used to cost what a car costs now. All true, but what can you do but live now?

Even gelato, which used to be divine all over Italy, is not dependably good anymore.

Send me out into another life lord because this one is growing faint I do not think it goes all the way.

What if you did not feel uncertainty, the white writing says. Are you exempt from doubt? Why not rename it excitement?

You have to churn somewhat when the roof covering your head is at stake, since to sell is to walk away from a cluster of memories and to buy is to choose where the future will take place.

Though much had been changed, I felt the spirit of the book was intact, and even enhanced by her vision.

To bury the grape tendril in such a way that it shoots out new growth I recognize easily as a metaphor for the way life must change from time to time if we are to go forward in our thinking.

I will translate myself into a new language.

ongoing drama of life in a small town.

It is not 2006 all over the world. So who are you in a place where 1950 or 1920 is about to arrive?

The South I knew didn't transcend. I wanted out of there. No future I imagined took place below the southern fall line. "She took the first thing smoking on the runway out of here," my family is fond of remembering. But they forget; there was no runway.

Frances O'Roark Dowell

Sometimes I wanted to peel away all of my skin and find a different me underneath.

She had changed him. The ice was in his eyes and in his heart, like he had predicted with that song, but now they were deep embedded there, all the pain of the world. Not pain to make you feel for somebody else but pain to make you stop feeling.

Pain didn't ever really stop, he thought; it just changed forms.

Non sum qualis eram. I am not what I once was.

We try on different dresses, different selves, but our souls are always the same - ongoing, full of light.

You try to decide if you should take this as a message of endings. Or beginnings.

The world isn't necessarily going to explode. There will just be vast change. There is hope. It is in the rain forests, the healing plants from there, and in sex and the children who are being born. They have different strains of DNA. They aren't really humans. So they will make the difference.

Are you? What? What you once were? I can't remember.