Quotes About Change

Many love stories are like the shells of hermit crabs, though others are more like chambered nautiluses, whose architecture grows with the inhabitant and whose abandoned smaller chambers are lighter than water and let them float in the sea.

The word adult implies that all the people who've attained legal majority make up a coherent category, but we are travelers who change and traverse a changing country as we go.

The stories shatter. Or you wear them out or leave them behind. Over time the story of the memory loses its power. Over time you become someone else. Only when the honey turns to dust are you free.

We are, as a culture, moving to a future with more people and more voices and more possibilities. Some people are being left behind, not because the future is intolerant of them but because they are intolerant of this future.

What lies ahead seems unlikely; when it becomes the past, it seems inevitable.

If paradise now arises in hell, it's because in the suspension of the usual order and the failure of most systems, we are free to live and act another way.

Measured over too short a span, change becomes imperceptible; people mistake today's peculiarities for eternal verities.

A comprehensive utopia may be out of reach, but the effort to realise it shapes the world for the better all the same. The belief may not be true, but it is useful. Belief makes the world.

graduated as I turned twenty, and then realized that the world and I were not ready for each other.

Instar implies something both celestial and ingrown, something heavenly and disastrous, and perhaps change is commonly like that, a buried star, oscillating between near and far.

Young feminists are a thrilling phenomenon: smart, bold, funny defenders of rights and claimers of space—and changers of the conversation.

Cause-and-effect assumes history marches forward, but history is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension.

Many events plant seeds, imperceptible at the time, that bear fruit long afterward.

To me, the grounds for hope are simply that we don't know what will happen next, and that the unlikely and the unimaginable transpire quite regularly.

Earlier 18th-century literary language was not supple enough to connect the life of the imagination to that of the street.

A better world, yes; a perfect world, never.

There's a public equivalent to private depression, a sense that the nation or the society rather than the individual is stuck. Things don't always change for the better, but they change, and we can play a role in that change if we act. Which is where hope comes in, and memory, the collective memory we call history.

I wonder sometimes what would happen if victory was imagined not just as the elimination of evil but the establishment of good...

We inhabit, in ordinary daylight, a future that was unimaginably dark a few decades ago, when people found the end of the world easier to envision than the impending changes in everyday roles, thoughts, practices that not even the wildest science fiction anticipated. Perhaps we should not have adjusted to it so easily. It would be better if we were astonished every day.

Nothing is ever so good that it can't stand a little revision, and nothing is ever so impossible and broken down that a try at fixing it is out of the question.

Stories migrate secretly. The assumption that whatever we now believe is just common sense, or what we always knew, is a way to save face. It's also a way to forget the power of a story and of a storyteller, the power in the margins, and the potential for change.

Only when the honey turns to dust are you free.

Were revolutions ever really what we thought them to be?

The status quo would like you to believe it is immutable, inevitable, and invulnerable, and lack of memory of a dynamically changing world reinforces this view.