Quotes About Change

And we shall all be changed in the twinkling of an eye.

They came out into the sunshine and the wind, one after the other like dice falling from a cup.

And yet, just because a story was a certain way didn't mean it would always be like that: stories took their old shape with them and fused it with the new shape. She didn't understand yet how all the tangles of their lives would sort themselves out in her story, but she supposed it would be like raking: not every bit of earth would be untangled at once.

They all looked like families coming back from Church, wearing their Sunday best. In reality, they were refugees who had no idea how drastically their lives were about to change.

You can't spend your whole life criticizing something and then, when you have the chance to do it better, refuse to go near it.

Even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance.

There are accepted revolutions, revolutions which are called revolutions; there are refused revolutions, which are called riots.

People lived as they had always done; there was no break between past and present. All that had happened in the past had washed away; there was always only the present. It was as though, as a result of some disturbance in the heavens, the early morning light was always receding into the darkness, and men lived in a perpetual dawn

It isn't easy to turn your back on the past. It isn't something you can decide to do just like that. It is something you have to arm yourself for, or grief will ambush and destroy you.

doing many more things until it seemed that ritual had replaced grief.

Change had come over him without his knowing. There had been no precise point at which the city had lost its romance and promise, no point at which he had begun to consider himself old, his career closed, and his visions of the future became only visions of Anand's future. Each realization had been delayed and had come, not as a surprise, but as a statement of a condition long accepted.

But this is madness. I am going in the wrong direction. There can't be a new life at the end of this.

A departure can feel like a desertion, a judgement on the place and people left behind.

That was the best time. The last day, the day of leaving. It was a good journey. It became different at the other end.

If you get too attached to your roots in the old sense, you might actually become unrooted, fossilized. At least in form, at least in style, you must get into the new stream, get the new roots. More of India is doing that. Style becomes substance in one generation. Things that one starts to do because other people are doing it – like wearing long pants, in my father's case – become natural for the next generation.

Ah, sahib. I know you just come to comfort a old man left to live by hisself. Soomintra say I too old-fashion. And Leela, she always by you. Why you don't sit down, sahib? It ain't dirty. Is just how it does look.' Ganesh didn't sit down. 'Ramlogan, I come to buy over your taxis.

Without always knowing what we were doing we were constantly adjusting to the arbitrariness by which we were surrounded.

In fact, the only person who seemed to examine the event with some astonishment was myself, who marvelled that such a turn in my life could occur so easily.

Because they could assess themselves, the Europeans were better equipped to cope with changes than we were.

All landscapes eventually turn to land, the gold of the imagination to the lead of reality

I don't know why they still building houses, Mr Biswas said. Nobody don't want a house these days. They just want a coal barrel. One coal barrel for one person. Whenever a baby born just get another coal barrel. You wouldn't see any houses anywhere then. Just a yard with five or six coal barrels standing up in two or three rows.

Confronted with her, I shed old fantasies. My body obeyed its new impulses, discovered in itself resources that answered my new need.

to be among the ruins was to have your time-sense unsettled.

Everywhere else men are in movement, the world is in movement, and the past can only cause pain.