Quotes About Change

Each test score had been lower than the last, reading like a strange weather forecast: ninety in September, mid-eighties in October, low seventies in November, sixties before Christmas.

Everyone in the Richardson family noticed Izzy's improved demeanor. "She's almost pleasant around you," Lexie told Mia one day. Izzy's adoration for Mia, like everything she did, did not come by halves: there was nothing Izzy wouldn't do for her.

Sometimes you need to scorch everything to the ground, and start over. After the burning the soil is richer, and new things can grow. People are like that, too.

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.

But after the burning the soil is richer, and new things can grow.

Oh, we don't use rabbits anymore," the pretty young doctor laughed, slipping the needle into the soft crook of Marilyn's arm. "We use frogs now.

Oh, we don't use rabbits anymore," the pretty young doctor laughed, slipping the needle into the soft crook of Marilyn's arm. "We use frogs now. Much faster and easier. Isn't modern science wonderful?

This baby name May Ling. Please take this baby and give her a better life. That first night, when the baby had finally fallen asleep in their laps, Mr. and Mrs. McCullough spent two hours flipping through the name dictionary. It had not occurred to them, then or at any point until now, to regret the loss of her old name.

People are like that, too, you know. They start over. They find a way.

Dave Matthews Band was dope; Bryan Adams was jake. Getting to third base was dope; being grounded was jake. After that, he'd stayed upstairs when Tim came over, and was meanly glad when he and Trip began to drift apart. Now here was Tim calling Moody's name—his

Maybe she didn't know what she was giving up until afterward. Maybe once she saw the baby she changed her mind.

of course she still donated to charity and voted Democrat, but so many years of comfortable suburban living had changed both of them.

Did you have to burn down the old to make way for the new?

she was trying on new skins, like all teenagers do,

parking lot.

Everything that loomed so large close up—school, their parents, their lives—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.

The Good Life in Shaker Heights," Cosmopolitan, March 1963

Behind them, empty bookshelves. Bird has never seen books on them, but there they stand, fossils of a long-gone era.

A million little chances to change the future.

So much will happen, he thinks, that I would want to tell you.

It is not too late. It is not too late.

the feeling that the place you're in is too small.

with the idea of starting over, so nearly all of her work has to do with change or transformation in some

James remembers: long ago, when they were young and the worst thing they could imagine was not being together . . . That moment, that connection, seems far away and small now, like something that happened in another life.