Quotes About Change

Time moves funny and it's hard to pin down. Occasionally, time offers you a hundred opportunities to do the right thing. Sometimes, it gives you only one chance.

Together they spent their whole lives waiting for their luck to change, as though luck were some fabulous tide that would one day flood and consecrate the marshes of our island, christening us in the iridescent ointments of a charmed destiny.

In Charleston, more than elsewhere, you get the feeling that the twentieth century is a vast, unconscionable mistake.

Comely was the town by the curving river that they dismantled in a year's time. Beautiful was Colleton in her last spring as she flung azaleas like a girl throwing rice at a desperate wedding. In dazzling profusion, Colleton ripened in a gauze of sweet gardens and the town ached beneath a canopy of promissory fragrance.

I was born in the age of alas.

I mourn for the quicksilvery racehorse passage of time. Its swiftness has caught me with the same ineffable start that comes to every man and woman who lives long enough. It remains as the single great surprise of any life. In

My father managed to change his entire life after I wrote a novel about his brutal regime as a family man. It took resoluteness and courage for my father to change, and I need to acknowledge that.

Over the years he began displaying that rarest of intellectual gifts—the ability and willingness to change his mind and do it in an orderly, well-reasoned way.

Gonzaga was the kind of place you'd not even think about loving until you'd left it for a couple of years.

But sometimes stories hide themselves from writers like trolls under bridges. Then the writers of the world must keep their bodies attuned for the sudden appearance of the story that is powerful enough to change their novels and their lives. They must train themselves to recognize the divine moment when a great story reveals itself.

This room had long served as a retreat from the disharmony and sadness of the first floor, and it was here I had fallen in love with these books and authors in a way that only lifelong readers know and understand. A good movie had never once affected me in the same life-changing way a good book could. Books had the power to alter my view of the world forever. A good movie could change my perceptions for a day.

My pre-Yamacraw theory of teaching held several sacred tenets, among these being that the teacher must always maintain an air of insanity, or of eccentricity out of control, if he is to catch and hold the attention of his students. The teacher must always be on the attack, looking for new ideas, changing worn-out tactics, and never, ever falling into patterns that lead to student ennui.

The mirror used to be my best friend. Now it is an assassin.

As a town, we had made the error of staying small—and there is no more unforgivable crime in America.

and wondered when it was, the exact moment, that I had lost her, that I let her fall too far away from me, that I betrayed the laughing girl and let the world have her. The photograph cut into my heart and I began to read the letter aloud.

When I write, I wait for the sudden appearance of signs and portents in the air, always on the lookout for secret messages encoded in graffiti or heralds disguised as strangers in the club cars of trains. A bright encounter with twins, a brother and sister, on a morning flight to Rome changed the entire configuration of the Wingo family in The Prince of Tides.

news from the king of seasons. Strength was my gift; it was also

Change comes hard, because we find nothing more traditional than traditions. We put so much effort into designing and building these hierarchies that we are tremendously resistant to rethinking them in spite of the pressure to do so.

Secrets I am all secrets now. I know when you walk into a room. I don't need to see or hear you behind me, but I know you're there and wish you'd touch my shoulder when you walk by. How can you do that, without a sound, send electricity, a current through a room full of people? When did this crazy secret life start? People see me but don't see I've changed. The me people see isn't the tangled me inside, trying not to think about you, your laugh splashing like a waterfall on a hot summer day.

Until you change the way that you look at things,Those things will never change.

If you're not getting better, you're getting worse.

Leaders who ignore change risk extinction.

And what is a futurist? Not a fortune-teller or a soothsayer, not a reader of tea leaves or crystal balls. A futurist is a planner and a doer. Futurists look at trends and innovation. They look for patterns of change. Then they act. Futurists don't just predict the future. They make the future happen.

The difference between today and tomorrow is some thing called change. It takes courage to embrace the future, because the future is about change, and change brings uncertainty and anxiety. We fear change; we prefer the comfort of the familiar. But change is inevitable. If we do not become future-focused, we are doomed to obsolescence when tomorrow arrives.