Quotes About Change

Do you have a mother?" "Naturally I used to have one," I said. "A father, too, if memory serves. Only somewhere along the way I seem to have lost them both. Careless of me.

The nerds have taken over the newsrooms.

Sexual intercourse beganIn nineteen sixty-three(Which was rather late for me)—Between the end of the Chatterley banAnd the Beatles' first LP.

Marrying left your maiden name disused.

Never such innocence again.

In times when nothing stood / but worsened, or grew strange / there was one constant good: / she did not change.

Never such innocence, Never before or since, As changed itself to past Without a word--the men Leaving the gardens tidy, The thousands of marriages Lasting a little while longer: Never such innocence again.

Sexual intercourse began in nineteen sixty-three (Which was rather late for me) between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles' first LP.

Why can't one stop being a son without becoming a father?

They say eyes clear with age, As dew clarifies air To sharpen evenings, As if time put an edge Round the last shape of things To show them there; The many-levelled trees, The long soft tides of grass Wrinkling away the gold Wind-ridden waves- all these, They say, come back to focus As we grow old. - Long Sight In Age

I almost never go out. I suppose everyone tries to ignore the passing of time: some people by doing a lot, being in California one year and Japan the next; or there's my way—making every day and every year exactly the same. Probably neither works.

Yet to me this decaying landscape has its uses: To make me remember, who am always inclined to forget, That there is always a changing at the root, And a real world in which time really passes. — Philip Larkin, from "New Year Poem," Collected Poems , ed. Anthony Thwaite (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1989)

Our children will not know it's a different country. All we can hope to leave them now is money.

The Trees The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said; The recent buds relax and spread, Their greenness is a kind of grief. Is it that they are born again And we grow old? No, they die too. Their yearly trick of looking new Is written down in rings of grain. Yet still the unresting castles thresh In fullgrown thickness every May. Last year is dead, they seem to say, Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Truly, though our element is time, We are not suited to the long perspectives Open at each instant of our lives. They link us to our losses: worse, They show us what we have as it once was, Blindly undiminished, just as though By acting differently we could have kept it so. — Philip Larkin, from "Reference Back," The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin , ed. Archie Burnett (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012)

It had not done so then, and could not now

Let me begin again as a speck of dust caught in the night winds sweeping out to sea. Let me begin this time knowing the world is salt water and dark clouds, the world is grinding and sighing all night, and dawn comes slowly, and changes nothing.

The writing of contemporary history can be among the most treacherous of ambitions. Everybody knows we never appreciate what we have till it's gone; that the owl of Minerva flies at dusk; that familiarity breeds contempt; and so forth.

fatal stabbing of a young black spectator while Mick Jagger vainly appealed to the crowd to "cool out" and love one another. Good-bye Sixties; welcome to the future.

Though pressure for constitutional change has tended to come from the left, various works critical of the contemporary polity have appeared in recent years from commentators on the right, a number adopting a polemical approach

minister, developed in importance during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

membership of the European Community (now the European Union) and the reforms introduced by a Labour government after 1997. In looking at change, there are

membership of the European Community (now the European Union) and the reforms introduced by a Labour government after 1997. In looking at change, there are essentially

been that of continuity and change in British politics. The theme is one that applies to the content of this edition. I have maintained the basic structure of the book, providing for continuity with previous editions. However, within