Quotes About Change

The trouble is we have no education,' he says. 'Only that would save us. It's too late for my father and mother–you see them–and it's too late for me. I'm thirty-five. My wife too, she is quite uneducated.' She smiles faintly. 'But my children go to school now. We have hope for them, and for the boy. But five children is too many. We had them again and again.

The mind has exactly the same power as the hands: not merely to grasp the world, but to change it.

It is a long way from Mr. Polly's discovery (If you don't like your life you can change it) to: There is no way out or round or through.

it is only the species Homo sapiens that is played out. 'The stars in their courses have turned against him and he has to give place to some other animal better adapted to face the fate that closes in on mankind.' In the final pages of the pamphlet, his trump of the last judgement has changed into the question: Can civilization be saved?

Culture is always on the move.

As you travel north across Ohio," Ohio State University dean Harlan Hatcher wrote in 1945, "you feel that you have been transported from Virginia into Connecticut.

The world, Left Coasters insisted, can be easily and frequently reinvented.

I've changed my mind, and when we're finished, Victoria, you won't remember your own name... let alone Viogets. ~ Max

Somewhere along the way, she'd ceased being Miss Stoker and had become Evaline. Not quite a friend, but no longer a stranger.

That was Chas. Furious and black-hearted one minute, ready to crack a wry joke the next.

The days passed on, the weeks passed on, and the track of the golden autumn wound its bright way visibly through the green summer of the trees.

Best to let the broken glass be broken glass, let it splinter into smaller pieces and dust and scatter. Let the cracks between things widen until they are no longer cracks but the new places for things. That was where they were now. The world wasn't ending: it had ended and now they were in the new place. They could not recognize it because they had never seen it before.

You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.

Maybe we become New Yorkers the day we realize that New York will go on without us.

New York City does not hold our former selves against us. Perhaps we can extend the same courtesy.

On one end there was who you were before you went underground, and on the other end a new person steps out into the light.

Cherish your old apartments and pause for a moment when you pass them. Pay tribute, for they are the caretakers for your reinventions.

Freedom was a thing that shifted as you looked at it, the way a forest is dense with trees up close but from outside, from the empty meadow, you see its true limits.

and for the second time that day he blesses the certainty of airports because he can always turn around and go someplace else.

They will have to destroy this city once we deliver the black box. The current bones will not accommodate the marrow of the device. They will have to raze the city and cart off the rubble to less popular boroughs and start anew.

At ninety, everything is air and the difference between you and the medium of your passage is disintegrating with every increment of the ascension.

Crossing a single street transformed the way people talked, determined the size and condition of the homes, the dimension and character of the dreams.

The way he saw it, living taught you that you didn't have to live the way you'd been taught to live. You came from one place but more important was where you decided to go.

You can change the law but you can't change people and how they treat each other. Nickel