Quotes About Change

Do you suppose you will look the same when you are an old woman as you do now? Most folk have three faces—the face they get when they're children, the face they own when they're grown, and the face they've earned when they're old. But when you live as long as I have, you get many more. I look nothing like I did when I was a wee thing of thirteen. You get the face you build your whole life, with work and loving and grieving and laughing and frowning.

Metamorphosis is the most profound of all acts.

Chyerti—that's us, demons and devils, small and big—are compulsive. We obsess. It's our nature. We turn on a track, around and around; we march in step; we act out the same tales, over and over, the same sets of motions, while time piles up like yarn under a wheel. We like patterns. They're comforting. Sometimes little things change—a car instead of a house, a girl not named Yelena. But it's no different, not really. Not ever.

Oh, September. My best girl. I shall tell you an awful, wonderful, unhappy, joyful secret: It is like that for everyone. One day you wake up and you are grown. And on the inside, you are no older than the last time you thought Wouldn't it be lovely to be all Grown-Up right this second?

One: A Library Is the Size of the Universe and the Universe Is the Size of a Library. Two: Everyone Is Looking for a Book Strong Enough to Change Them. Three: Books Operate Under Unstable Physicks so Turn out the Lights when You Lock Up.

Hats change everything. September knew this with all her being, deep in the place where she knew her own name, and that her mother would still love her even though she hadn't waved goodbye. For one day her father had put on a hat with golden things on it and suddenly he hadn't been her father anymore, he had been a soldier, and he had left. Hats have power. Hats can change you into someone else.

Autumn is the very soul of metamorphosis, a time when the world is poised at the door of winter - which is the door of death - but has not yet fallen. It is a world of contradictions: a time of harvest and plenty but also of cold and hardship. Here we dwell in the midst of life, but we know most keenly that all things must pass away and shrivel. Autumn turns the world from one thing into another. The year is seasoned and wise but not yet decrepit or senile.

Autumn has a hungry heart - September is the beginning of death.

You can never know how your clock runs. But it does run - and always faster than you think.

We all just keep moving, September. We keep moving until we stop.

Marya pinned out her childhood like a butterfly. She considered it the way a mathematician considers an equation.

The future is a messy, motley business, little girl.

Clothes are a story you choose to tell about yourself, a different one every day.

You get the face you build your whole life, with work and loving and grieving and laughing and frowning.

When the world changes, it stashes us away where we can't make it run the other way again.

Fairy tales have always been about getting through the worst of everything, the darkest and the deepest and the bloodiest of events. They are about surviving, and what you look like when you emerge from the trial. The reason we keep telling fairy tales over and over, that we need to keep telling them, is that the trials change. So the stories change too, and the heroines and villains and magical objects, to keep them true. Fairy tales are the closets where the world keeps its skeletons.

I still think of myself as a house. Ravan tried to fix this problem of self-image, as he called it. To teach me to phrase my communication in terms of a human body. To say: let us hold hands instead of let us hold kitchens. To say put our heads together and not put our parlors together. But it is not as simple as replacing words anymore. Ravan is gone. My hearth is broken.

The tales lovers tell each other about how they met are hushed and secret things. They change year by year, for we all meet many times as we grow up and become different and new and exciting people--and this never stops, even for a minute, even when we are ninety.

That's what happens to the old guard, my pup. You can always count on it. We who serve, we who make the world run. When the world changes, it stashes us away where we can't make it run the other way again.

The kind of hope I have doesn't begin and end with demanding everything go back to the way it was when it can't, it can't ever, that's not how time works.

You can be innocent again. It's not true, what they say, that you can never get it back. You can. It's only that most folk cannot be bothered.

That is what happens when a person lives alone for so long - no one else can change their ways.

We must not dwell on what we were in our salad days when soup days steam now upon the table!

For when a box is shut, you cannot tell what it might contain, so you might as well say it contains everything, because, really, it could contain anything, see? But when you open it, you affect what is inside. Observing something changes it, that's a law, nothing to be done.