Quotes About Change

Fate, that glockenspiel, will turn upon the hour.

Life so often arrives all of a sudden.

How can so many things become a bore by middle age—philosophy, radicalism, and other fast foods—but heartbreak keeps its sting?

Strange to be almost fifty, no? I feel like I just understood how to be young." "Yes! It's like the last day in a foreign country. You finally figure out where to get coffee, and drinks, and a good steak. And then you have to leave. And you won't ever be back.

Life so often arrives all of a sudden. And who knows which side you will find yourself on?

Less takes one last look at the ancient castle of mud and straw, remade every year or so as the rains erode the walls, plastered and replastered so that nothing remains of the old ksar except its former pattern. Something like a living creature of which not a cell is left of the original.

It feels possible that memory will never be finished with this moment. Then they step apart.

Why do today's young men insist on marrying? Was this why we all threw stones at the police, for weddings

No, no, I said. No, no, Nathan, not because of you. It's something ... I can't explain it to you. I've seen myself from all sides. That's a rare thing to do. I've seen you, too. I understand things, I think. 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.

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.

Just one small thing had changed, such a small thing really. What difference could it make, the era in which we are born?

What do we want from the past, anyway? For it to trifle with us no longer? For it to cease its surprises, its stirrings, its stings, for it to be fixed forever—for it to die? But the past is like those jellyfish that, when harmed, coil into themselves and revert to immature blobs from which they begin new lives and become, in simple terms, immortal. What can we do but look away from such painful miracles?

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?

Strange to be almost fifty, no? I feel like I just understood how to be young." "Yes! It's like the last day in a foreign country. You finally figure out where to get coffee, and drinks, and a good steak. And then you have to leave. And you won't ever be back." "You

Realizing we are no longer in love is not the heartbreaking sensation we imagine when we are in love—because it is no sensation at all. It is a realization made by a bystander.

Fuck it. I gave up smoking. and I can give up love.

the rescue. And today Less was one of them.

the grief...had never been over him, a clumsy foreign child. It had always been for themselves, so young then, learning that you could not tailor your hopes like a suit and expect them to fit forever

One could not withdraw the days of one's youth in retirement and throw them on the fire to warm old bones.

I miss when my future was more interesting to me than my past

It is not true that love is not love which alters when it alteration finds. Love alters all the time; it is fluid, in perceptual flux, an evolving business across a lifetime.

There is no essential self that lies pure as a vein of gold under the chaos of experience and chemistry. Anything can be changed, and we must understand the human organism as a sequence of selves that succumb to or choose one another.

If something or someone doesn't work, it's in a state of grace, progress, and evolution. It will attract love and empathy. If it does work, it has merely completed its job and is probably dead.

Though many of us take pride in how different we are from our parents, we are endlessly sad at how different our children are from us.