Quotes About Change

Every day we reconstruct ourselves out of the salvage of our yesterdays.

Perhaps after all, for all our talk of change, redemption or personal growth, for all our dependence on therapists, religious faith or mood-altering drugs both legal and non, we're doomed simply to go on repeating the same patterns over and over in our lives, dressing them up in different clothes like children at play so we can pretend we don't recognize them when we look into mirrors.

The summer has ended. The garden withers. The mornings become chill. I am thirty, I am thirty-four–the years turn dry as leaves.

He no longer lives in years; he is down to seasons. Finally it will become single nights, each one perilous as a lunar journey. He

Events need their invitation, dissolutions their start.

Certain things I remember exactly as they were. They are merely discolored a bit by time, like coins in the pocket of a forgotten suit.

Suddenly I am crushed by the simplicity of it all: he is leaving.

It was all leaving her in slow, imperceptible movements, like the tide when one's back is turned: everyone, everything she had known. So all of grief and happiness, far from being buried with one, vanished beforehand except for scattered pieces. She lived among forgotten episodes, unknown faces bereft of names, closed off from the very world she had created; that was how it came to be. But I must show nothing of that, she thought. Her children---she must not reveal it to them.

Certains visages vous subjuguent, on s'en détourne avec le sentiment de renoncer même à respirer. Demain, j'aurai oublié tout ça, se dit-il. Le matin, tout est différent, les choses deviennent réelles.

The children playing by the fountains will become old men, but nothing of this will have changed

There's a time in life when everything becomes ex—ex-athlete, ex-president, expatriate, x-ray.

suddenly felt frightened. He was reaching that age, he was at the edge of it, when the world becomes suddenly more beautiful, when it reveals itself in a special way, in every detail, roof and wall, in the leaves of trees fluttering faintly before a rain. The world was opening itself, as if to allow, now that life was shortening, one long, passionate look, and all that had been withheld would finally be given.

The best way to predict the future is to invent it. – Alan Kay

What I found was a moment where the main character has to figuratively look at himself, as in the mirror. He is confronted with a disturbing truth: change or die.

A great short story is about the fallout from one, shattering moment.

in late sixteenth-century Stratford-upon-Avon, where malting was the town's principal industry, anybody with a bit of spare change and a barn was storing as much grain as possible.

Let me once get from this country and give me a dungeon or a hovel in any other").

Doing anything for the holidays? Joe asked me. We were stopped at a traffic light that was generally acknowledged to be the slowest traffic light in Merrick. Whole days would pass and this traffic light would stay red. Kingdoms rose and fell, presidential administrations came and went, and the light obstinately refused to change.

A Gallup survey in 1962 indicated that only about one-third of American women considered themselves victims of discrimination. Eight years later the proportion had risen to a half, and by 1974 to two-thirds. By any standard these were striking measures of social and cultural change.18

Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death... others through sheer inability to cross the street.

Time lies frozen there. It's always Then. It's never Now.

Progress was all right. Only it went on too long.

The cold Duke was afraid of Now, for Now has warmth and urgency, and Then is dead and buried.

Eleanor Roosevelt and others said polio changed Roosevelt, that it made him more compassionate. That may be so. But the first impact of the disease was to call forth elements of his nature that no one had seen before - elements that even he may not have known he possessed. His decision to defy polio was a critical moment in his life - perhaps the critical moment.