Quotes About Change

There are moments in your life when you know that the sentence that will come next will change your life forever, although you realize, even as you are anticipating this sentence, that your life has already changed. Changed some time ago, and you simply didn't know it.

But after a while, that too passes, and she and Jack go back to normal, as they have been before, which is to say that they, like all the other couples Kathryn has ever known, live in a state of gentle decline, of being infinitesimally, but not agonizingly, less than they were the day before.

she suddenly looks different to Olympia, physically different, as though a portrait has been alterred. And Olympia thinks that possibly such adjustments might have to be made for everyone she knows. Upon meeting a person, a sketch is formed, and for the life of the relationship, however intimate or not, a portrait is painted, with oils or pastels or with black ink or with watercolor, and only at a persons's death can the portraits be considered finished. Perhaps not even at the person's death.

To what extent does time distort memory>

kind of necessary acceptance will form around her, like a lobster making its new shell, one that will be soft and easily breakable in the beginning but so hard that only lobster crackers can shatter it in the end. She can hardly wait.

A calamity, a catastrophe- it changes everything, doesn't it? It makes you aware that you cannot be indifferent toward your life. You cannot simply give away your life.

One day a man has a job, and life is full of possibilities. The next day the job and the car are gone, and the man cannot look his wife in the eye.

But before that, before the farm went bad, Alphonse remembers being happy. He didn't know it was happiness and couldn't have put a name to it then - in fact he's pretty sure he never even thought about it - but now he knows that it was happiness.

Rowan is leaving him. She's been leaving him for months.

Years had passed, and all of life was different now.

Es decir, ellos, como todas las otras parejas que ha conocido, viven en un estado de suave declive, de convertirse, de modo sutil y sin torturas, cada día en algo menos de lo que eran el día anterior.

Everything that happened in the past It was all necessary to bring us to where we are.

She used to cry roughly three times a year. Now she seemed to cry three times before breakfast. Could that be considered progress?

We aren't in high school. We aren't really in our families and we aren't in our houses. Those are the places we grew up and the times we spent together, but they aren't us. If we think they are, then we're lost, because times end and places are lost. We aren't any place or any time . . . We are everywhere.

I allowed myself to suffer how jarringly destructive the present feels and how fragile the past.

Sometimes you need to make a mess. -Loretta, the Rollinses' hosekeeper

She thought she would know when it happened. But now, as she looked around, she wondered if it was really like that at all. Maybe it happened in a million different ways, when you were thinking of it and you weren't. Maybe there was no gap, no jump, no chasm. You didn't forget yourself all at once. Maybe you just looked around one time or another and you thought, Hey. And there you were.

People said things they didn't mean all the time. Everybody else in the world seemed able to factor it in. But not Lena. Why did she believe the things people said? Why did she cling to them so literally? Why did she think she knew people when she clearly didn't? Why did she imagine that the world didn't change, when it did? Maybe she didn't change. She believed what people said and she stayed the same. (Lena, 211)

It was funny how the old practices always came around again. It was the rhythm of human enterprise to invent and worship some new approach, to fully reject it a generation later, to realize the need for it again a generation or two after that and then hastily reinvent it as new, usually without its original elegance. Scientists hated to look backward for anything.

The present no matter what I brought couldn't change the past. The Past was set and sealed.

Carmen didn't like change, and she certainly didn't like endings.

But like everything else, love changed.

People left a lot of things behind when they went in the water. Their clothes, their stuff, their makeup, their fixed-up hair, their voices, their hearing, their sight—at least as the normally experienced them.

I hated motorcycles. I said to my mother, 'I'll never get a motorcycle.' And she said, 'You never know what you'll want when you are older.' After that, the thing that scared me was not so much the motorcycle itself, but that I could turn into a person who would want one. I was scared of the idea that I could become an entirely different person, a stranger to myself.