Quotes About Change

How can we know whether the course of a life would have been changed by some particular alteration in its early history?

Everything changed with the First World War. The Middle East was reorganized, redefined, and the seeds were planted for a century of bloodshed.

Men's lives are not progressions, as conventionally rendered in history paintings, nor are they a series of facts that may be enumerated & in their proper order understood. Rather they are a series of transformations, some immediate & shocking, some so slow as to be imperceptible, yet so complete & horrifying that at the end of his life a man may search his memory in vain for a moment of correspondence between his self in his dotage & him in his youth.

she, armed with both & abandoning the joys of reason that had meant so much to her as well as me, made a suitably advantageous marriage with an ironmonger with a face like an anvil & a soul like a slag, & so I never saw her freckles fade, her auburn hair dull, never had to watch our love turn to that non-colour, white.

And one thing, as they sometimes do, led not to another, but shattered a world.

He felt the withering of something, the way risk was increasingly eliminated, replaced with a bland new world where the viewing of food preparation would be felt to be more than the reading of poetry; where excitement would come from paying for a soup made out of foraged grass. He had eaten soup made out of foraged grass in the camps; he preferred food.

As a meteorite strike long ago explains the large lake now, so Amy's absence shaped everything, even when—and sometimes most particularly when—he wasn't thinking of her.

Rock to gravel to dust to mud to rock and so the world goes, as his mother used to say when he demanded reasons or explanation as to how the world got to be this way or that. The world is, she would say. It just is, boy.

A man, good or bad, was magnificent. It was not possible that this thing that was nothing and would never change [death] could mean the end of everything that moved and changed within him - the good, the bad, the magnificent. Yet it did.

You could never know when everything might change—a mood, a decision, a blanket. A life. They

Really, the new hand felt normal, no different from her old hand. It was impossible to say why she felt so oddly about it, thought Anna. It was her hand, after all. Except somehow, looking at it, in a way she had no words to describe, it no longer was.

Pushing away, pushing in: the pattern of so much that was to follow.

Thus attired in the night of their grief, they prepared to depart into a morning she seemed determined not to relinquish.

He read and reread 'Ulysses'. The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends, 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

All we really want is to get to the point where the past can explain nothing about us and we can get on with life.

We are past the end of things now, but I don't want to leave.

Things happen when people are not where they belong, and the world moves forward and back by that principle.

All this is a natural part of the aging process, in which you find yourself with less to do and more opportunities to eat your guts out regretting everything you have done.

The most important things of your life can change so suddenly, so unrecoverably, that you can forget even the most important of them and their connections, you are so taken up by the chanciness of all's that happened and by all that could and will happen next.

He smiled at me, and it was not the worried, nervous smile from before, but a smile that meant he was pleased. And I don't remember him ever smiling at me that way again.

Just exactly what that good life was--the one I expected--I cannot tell you now exactly, though I wouldn't say it has not come to pass, only that much has come in between.

when you're young your opponent is the future; but when you're not young, your opponent's the past and everything you've done in it and the problem of getting away from it.

How amazingly far normalcy extends; how you can keep it in sight as if you were on a raft sliding out to sea, the stitch of land growing smaller and smaller. Or in a balloon swept up on a column of prairie air, the ground widening and flattening, growing less and less distinct below you. You notice it, or you don't notice it. But you're already too far away and all is lost.

Against these forces -- an earth rotating, a sun lowering its angle in the sky, winds filling with rain and the geese arriving -- time is just a made-up thing, and recedes in importance, and should.