Quotes About Change

En términos cinematográficos lo que hacemos es ir cambiando el enfoque con lentitud, abriendo el objetivo y alejándonos de esa vida en la que estábamos estancados hasta alcanzar una perspectiva más amplia.

we often resist what we most need.

A mystery can be very simple: if I drive this road, not my usual road, what will I see? Changing a known route throws us into the now. We become refocused on the visible, visual world. Sight leads to insight.

Remember the maxim "Leap, and the net will appear.

La vida verdadera se vive cuando ocurren cambios diminutos». LEÓN TOLSTOI

the average Frenchman would shrug, as if to say: These notions of yours are all very fascinating, no doubt, but we make a decent living. Nobody has ulcers. I have time to work on my monograph about Balzac, and my foreman enjoys his espaliered pear trees. I think as a matter of fact, we do not wish to make the changes that you suggest.

Was it a sign of Creeping Decrepitude?

had been a year earlier. Looking back, it had been a year of growth. Paul's personality had enlarged, he'd gained further wisdom, if not salary

But things change, of course, and so do the ways in which people see themselves.

In every life there is a turning point. A moment so tremendous, so sharp and clear that one feels as if one's been hit in the chest, all the breath knocked out, and one knows, absolutely knows without the merest hint of a shadow of a doubt that one's life will never be the same.

When you're young you prefer the vulgar months, the fullness of the seasons. As you grow older you learn to like the in-between times, the months that can't make up their minds. Perhaps it's a way of admitting that things can't ever bear the same certainty again.

You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed. People may not notice at the time, but that doesn't matter. The world has been changed nonetheless.

There is accumulation. There is responsibility. And beyond these, there is unrest. There is great unrest.

Perhaps this was one of the tragedies life plots for us: it is our destiny to become in old age what in youth we would have most despised.

You get towards the end of life—no, not life itself, but of something else: the end of any likelihood of change in that life. You are allowed a long moment of pause, time enough to ask the question: what else have I done wrong?

Some of the freckles I once loved are now closer to liver spots. But it's still the eyes we look at, isn't it? That's where we found the other person, and find them still.

Grief reconfigures time, its length, its texture, its function: one day means no more than the next, so why have they been picked out and given separate names?

Had my life increased, or merely added to itself? There had been addition and subtraction in my life, but how much multiplication?

Perhaps the world progresses not by maturing, but by being in a permanent state of adolescence, of thrilled discovery.

You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed...

Was it the case that colours dimmed as the eye grew elderly? Or was it rather that in youth your excitement about the world transferred itself onto everything you saw and made it brighter?

Discovering, for example, that as witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty, as to what you are or have been. [p. 65]

He always thought that Touie's long illness would somehow prepare him for her death. He always imagined that grief anf guilt, if they followed, would be more clear-edged, more defined, more finite. Instead they seem like weather, like clouds constantly re-forming into new shapes, blown by nameless, unidentifiable winds.

Every love story is a potential grief story. If not at first, then later. If not for one, then for the other. Sometimes for both.