Quotes About Change

In the beginning it was always the same. But. I kept trying. Then one day I accidentally moved as the shutter clicked. A shadow appeared. The next time I saw the outline of my face, and a few weeks later my face itself. It was the opposite of disappearing.

Sometimes I get the feeling that we're just a bunch of habits. The gestures we repeat over and over, they're just our need to be recognized. Without them, we'd be unidentifiable. We have to reinvent ourselves every minute.

She was gone, and all that was left was the space where you'd grown around her, like a tree that grows around a fence.

And so he did the hardest thing he'd ever done in his life: he picked up his hat and walked away.

Alone in my room, wrapped in a blanket, I whimpered and talked aloud to myself, recalling the lost glory of my youth when I considered myself, and was considered by others, a bright and capable person. It seemed that was all gone now.

I read differently now, more painstakingly, knowing I am probably revisiting the books I love for the last time. (245)

I had the elated, otherworldly feeling I sometimes get entering the sphere of another's life, when for a moment changing my banal habits and living like that seems entirely possible, a feeling that always dissolves by the next morning, when I wake up to the familiar, unmovable shapes of my own life.

In the months after the relationship ends, a person can seem to grow at a lightning rate, like in a nature documentary where weeks of footage is run at high speed to show a plant unfurling in seconds, but in reality the person has been growing all along, under the surface, and it is only in their new freedom, in their hair-raising aloneness, that the person can allow for these underground things to break through and unfurl themselves in the light.

Alone in my room, wrapped in a blanket, I whimpered and talked aloud to myself, recalling the lost glory of my youth when I considered myself, and was considered by others, a bright and capable person. It seemed that was all gone now. I wondered whether what I was experiencing was some sort of psychotic break, the sort that ambushes a person who until then has lived an ordinary life, auguring a new existence full of torment and struggle.

The air felt different in my lungs. The world no longer looked the same. You change and then you change again. You become a dog, a bird, a plant that always leans to the left. Only now that my son was gone did I realize how much I'd been living for him. When I woke up in the morning it was because he existed, and when I ordered food in the night it was because he existed, and when I wrote my book it was because he existed to read it.

It would mark the end of a year that he might look back on as hands, a pivot between two lines. Or not: maybe enough time, would pass that eventually he would look back on his life, all of it, as a series of events both logical and continuous.

Every year, the memories I have of my father become more faint, unclear, and distant. once they were vivid and true, then they became like photographs, and now they are more like photographs of photographs. But sometimes, at rare moments, a memory of him will return to me with such suddenness and clarity that all the feeling I've pushed down for years springs out like a jack-in-the-box.

She abandoned the garden, and the mums and asters that had trusted her to see them through to the first frost hung their waterlogged heads.

Atunci am v?zut-o. E ciudat ce poate urzi mintea când inima o îmboldeÈ™te. Ar?ta altfel decât mi-o aminteam eu. ?i totuÈ™i. Era aceeaÈ™i. Ochii: aÈ™a am recunoscut-o. Mi-am spus: "Vas?zic? aÈ™a È›i se arat? îngerul. Oprit la vârsta la carea te-a iubit cel mai mult.

The whole afternoon might go by without our saying a word. If we do talk, we might never speak in Yiddish. The words of our childhood became strangers to us--we couldn't use them in the same way and so we chose not to use them at all. Life demanded a new language.

I always feel a little pang of hurt that first day when darkness falls without warning. It's the slight, sickening feeling of being reminded of the reckless authority of time, of losing your bearings in a world whose dimensions you thought you'd learned to live with.

The absurdity of believing that the decisions about who we love, and who we bind ourselves to, could be arrived at rationally? Or of assuming that we would be afforded a fair or natural death? Or did she mean the absurdity of having once believed in the possibility of dedicating one's life to anything beyond tomorrow, beyond just surviving? Or just the simple, long-standing absurdity of having lived a beginning that bore so little relation to the end?

Doesn't part of the awe that fills us when we confront the unknown come from understanding that, should it at last flood into us and become known, we would be altered?

No sé qué decir de él sino que me ha conmovido del modo en que uno desea que lo conmueva cada libro que empieza a leer. Quiero decir que, de algún modo que casi no sabría describir, me ha transformado.

Se había ido, y lo único que quedaba era el espacio en que habías crecido en torno a ella, rodeándola, como crece un árbol rodeando una cerca.

How little needs to stay the same for you to continue the effort they call, for lack of a better word, being human.

She was one of a group of girls he'd observed bloom from scraggly weeds into tropical beauties who churned the air around them into a dense humidity.

And it ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things, because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new.

I also believe that he who adapts his policies to suit the times will succeed, and he who does not, will fail.