Quotes About Change

But he learned what he had to, and he changed, and so he made himself exceptional.

Uncle Burley said hills always looked blue when you were far away from them. That was a pretty color for hills; the little houses and barns and fields looked so neat and quiet tucked against them. It made you want to be close to them. But he said that when you got close they were like the hills you'd left, and when you looked back your own hills were blue and you wanted to go back again. He said he reckoned a man could wear himself out going back and forth.

What the government will or will not do is finally beside the point. If people do not have the government they want, then they will have a government that they must either change or endure. Finally

It just all of a sudden came over me, so that in one breath I was lost and a stranger, and in the next I was found.

People who thus set their lives against destruction have necessarily confronted in themselves the absurdity that they have recognized in their society.

I don't remember when I did not know Port William, the town and the neighborhood. My relation to that place, my being in it and my absences from it, is the story of my life. That story has surprised me almost every day—but now, in the year 1986, so near the end, it seems not surprising at all but only a little strange, as if it all has happened to somebody I don't yet quite know. Certainly, all of it has happened to somebody younger.

And yet in Port William, as everywhere else, it was already the second decade of the twentieth century. And in some of the people of the town and the community surrounding it, one of the characteristic diseases of the twentieth century was making its way: the suspicion that they would be greatly improved if they were someplace else.

He went through the old motions of his life, taking care of what needed caring for, keeping mostly quiet about what was on his mind. But his hard waiting changed him; you could see it in his face.

You think the winter will never end, and then, when you don't expect it, when you have almost forgotten it, warmth comes and a different light.

The tractor's arrival had signaled, among other things, agriculture's shift from an almost exclusive dependence on free solar energy to a total dependence on costly fossil fuel.

When "husbandry" becomes "science," the lowly has been exalted and the rustic has become urbane. Purporting to increase the sophistication of the humble art of farming, this change in fact brutally oversimplifies it.

Even old, your husband is the young man you remember now. Even dead, he is the man you remember, not as he was but as he is, alive still in your love. Death is a sort of lens, though I used to think of it as a wall or a shut door. It changes things and makes them clear. Maybe it is the truest way of knowing this dream, this brief and timeless life.

The survivors of the old life come to pay their respects. The neighbors, old and young, come. People who have moved away, maybe a long time ago, come back. You see people you knew when you were young and now don't recognize, people who may never come back again, people you may never see again. We feel the old fabric torn, pulling apart, and we know how much we have loved each other.

There should be no relenting in our efforts to influence politics and politicians. But in the name of honesty and sanity we must recognize the limits of politics.

We long ago gave up the wish to have things that were adequate or even excellent; we have preferred instead to have things that were up-to-date.

The big idea of education, from first to last, is the idea of a better place. Not a better place where you are, because you want it to be better and have been to school and learned to make it better, but a better place somewhere else. In order to move up, you have got to move on.

One must begin in one's own life the private solutions that can only in turn become public solutions.

If I could have found in my mind a plain and simple way to be right, that would have been something. I would have been changed in another way, and my life ever afterward would have been different. But having reached the crisis—the crossroad, so to speak—I failed. I didn't have at all the feeling of being right.

If you talk a good line without being changed by what you say, then you are not just hypocritical and doomed; you have become an agent of the disease.

The world as it is would always be a reminder of the world that was, and of the world that is to come.

They were not going to live again in a time like that.

Once the revolution of exploitation is under way, statesmanship and craftsmanship are gradually replaced by salesmanship.

But I had read all of [the Bible] by then, and I could see that it changed. And if it changed, how could all of it be true?

The difference between me and Mr. and Mrs. Feltner, as I had to see and feel even in my own grief, was that they were old and I was young. I was filled with life, with my life and Virgil's life, with the life of our baby, and with other lives that might, in time, come to me. But the Feltners had begun to be old. Life had quit coming to them, and was going away.