Quotes About Change

Books—all books—are complicated things, muttering at us in different contradictory voices, refusing to stay the same when we go back to them. Tying them down too much robs of them of the magic.

Where is the real Less? Less the young man terrified of love? The dead-serious Less of twenty-five years ago? Well, he has not packed him at all. After all these years, Less doesn't even know where he's stored.

I've got a theory. Now, hear me out. It's that our lives are half comedy and half tragedy. And for some people, it just works out that the first entire half of their lives is tragedy and then the second half is comedy.

No one would have known, from how he held my hand, [that] over the years of heartache he had hatched a plot to change my life forever. He held his grip and would not let me go. I do not know what joins the parts of an atom, but it seems what binds one human to another is pain.

A man he almost stayed with, almost loved, and now he does not even recognize him on the street. Either Less is an asshole, or the heart is a capricious thing. It is not impossible both are true.

Almost sixty years ago, just after midnight, a few feet from the river where they danced, a wonder of modern engineering occurred: overnight, the Berlin Wall arose. It was the night of August 15, 1961. Berliners awoke on the sixteenth to this marvel, more of a fence at first, concrete posts driven into the streets and festooned with barbed wire. They knew trouble would come but expected it in degrees. Life so often arrives all of a sudden. And who knows which side you will find yourself on?

Strange to be almost fifty, no? I feel like I just understood how to be young.

Change was not something you waited for, quietly, mutely, in a house by the ocean, nothing would ever change unless we forced it into shape.

Well"—Lewis announcing over coffee and honeyed flatbreads—"we are being given an opportunity for a different experience than the one we were expecting.

The garden was planted four hundred years ago, when the surrounding area was poplar. The woman makes a sweeping gesture, and he nods in appreciation. And now, Less says, it's unpoplar.

I understand that it wasn't that you didnt want to be with me anymore, but you didn't want to be yourself anymore, the one you were with me.

It's true things can go on till you die. And people use the same old table, even though it's falling apart and it's been repaired and repaired, just because it was their grandmother's. That's how towns become ghost towns. It's how houses become junk stores. And I think it's how people get old.

They have come dressed as robots or space goddesses or aliens because a writer has changed their lives.

They knew trouble would come but expected it in degrees. Life so often arrives all of a sudden.

What made it happen? What made it not happen? Thinking of a cure, a week away from the city, a dinner party with other geniuses, a new rug, a new shirt, a new way to hold him in bed, and failing and failing and somehow, at random, succeeding. Was it worth it?

Perhaps he was burning down a house in which he no longer wanted to live.

What I wanted to say was: I understand that it wasn't that you didn't want to be with me anymore, but you didn't want to be yourself anymore, the one you were with me.

And then, inevitably, one day—it's gone. And we realize that we thought we were the only changing thing, the only variable, in the world; that the objects and people in our lives are there for our pleasure, like the playing pieces of a game, and cannot move of their own accord; that they are held in place by our need for them, by our love. How stupid.

Strange to be almost 50, no? I feel like I just understood how to be young.

Like a landmark, a pyramid-shaped stone or a cypress, that we assume will never move. So we can find our way home. And then, inevitably, one day—it's gone. And we realize that we thought we were the only changing thing, the only variable, in the world; that the objects and people in our lives are there for our pleasure, like the playing pieces of a game, and cannot move of their own accord; that they are held in place by our need for them, by our love. How stupid

And then, inevitably, one day it's gone. And we realise we thought we were the only changing thing, the only variable in the world. That the objects and people in our lives are there for our pleasure. Like the playing pieces of a game and cannot move of their own accord. That they are held in place by our need for them. By our love. How stupid.

Andrew Sean Greer

This is once-in-a-lifetime suffering and pain and heartache and yet it may be your only chance to decide what you really want. None of this I don't want to change bullshit. Hell no—you've changed. That's happened. Now what? Everything changes and this one fucking time, you're in charge of it, my God, so choose! Make the wrong choice, that's fine! That's fine! But choose.

And we realize that we thought we were the only changing thing, the only variable, in the world; that the objects and people in our lives are there for our pleasure, like the playing pieces of a game, and cannot move of their own accord; that they are held in place by our need for them, by our love. How stupid.