Quotes About Change

All of that will be gone by morning. Instead, they will dissect this last evening for years to come. What had they missed that they should have seen? What small gesture, forgotten, might have changed everything? They will pick it down to the bones, wondering how this had all gone so wrong, and they will never be sure.

She did not know how to explain what happened, how everything has changed in just one day, how someone she loved so dearly could be there one minute, and the next minute: gone.

Nearly two decades later, others would raise this question, would talk about books as mirrors and windows, and Ed Lim, tired by then, would find himself as frustrated as he was grateful. We've always known, he would think; what took you so long?

I could have done that, Marilyn thought. And the words clicked into place like puzzle pieces, shocking her in their rightness. The hypothetical past-perfect. The tense of missed chances. Tears dripped down her chin. No! She though suddenly. I could do that.

At last something important had occurred, something that she ought to write down. But she did not know how to explain what had happened, how everything had changed in just one day, how someone she loved so dearly could be there one minute, and the next minute: gone .

It happened so slowly that you might not even notice it at all, like the sky turning from dusk to dark.

Change doesn't just happen," her mother had always said, echoing the Shaker motto. "It has to be planned.

Nath had just started the first grade, Lydia had just started nursery school, Hannah had not yet even been imagined. For the first time since she'd been married, Marilyn found herself unoccupied. She was twenty-nine years old, still young, still slender. Still smart, she thought. She could go back to school now, at last, and finish her degree. Do everything she'd planned before the children came along. Only now she couldn't remember how to write a paper, how

Sex changed things, she realized-not just between you and the other person, but between you and everyone.

But she did not know how to explain what had happened, how everything had changed in just one day, how someone she loved so dearly could be there one minute, and the next minute: gone.

There was no room left in her for anger. Something within her tipped and cracked.

Everything that loomed so large close up - all you had to do was step away, and they shrank to nothing. You could stop taking their phone calls, tear up their letters, pretend they'd never existed. Start over as a new person with a new life. Just a problem of geography, he thought, with the confidence of someone who had never yet tried to free himself of family.

She had learned, with Izzy's birth, how your life could trundle along on its safe little track and then,

with no warning, skid spectacularly off course.

how your life could trundle along on its safe little track and then, with no warning, skid spectacularly off course.

Ela havia aprendido (...) que a vida podia estar seguindo seu caminhozinho seguro e então, sem qualquer aviso, descarrilhar de forma impressionante.

For the first time in his life, he is unremarkable, and this feels like power.

By the time they had graduated, he had fallen for Shaker Heights as well, the way Elena described it: the first planned community, the most progressive community, the perfect place for young idealists. In his own little hometown, they'd been suspicious of ideas: he'd grown up surrounded by a kind of resigned cynicism, though he'd been sure the world could be better.

Mrs. Richardson, however, could not let Izzy be, and the feeling coalesced in all of them: Izzy pushing, her mother restraining, and after a time no one could remember how the dynamic had started, only that it had existed always.

He didn't know what exactly he wanted to say— I'm sorry, I didn't mean it —only the ever-deepening regret at how things were turning out between them, the desperate and impossible desire to go back to the way things had been.

She had learned, with Izzy's birth, how your life could trundle along on its safe little track and then, with no warning, skid spectacularly off course.

She replaces the phone number on the board, her damp fingers smudging the ink so that the digits blur as if in a strong wind, or underwater.

She had learned, with Izzy's birth, how your life could trundle along on its safe little track and then, with no warning, skid spectacularly off course. Every time Mrs. Richardson looked at Izzy, that feeling of things spiraling out of control coiled around her again, like a muscle she didn't know how to unclench.

We don't burn our books, she says. We pulp them. Much more civilized, right? Mash them up, recycle them into toilet paper. Those books wiped someone's rear end a long time ago. Oh, says Bird. So that's what happened to his mother's books. All those words