Quotes About Change

What was bright and exciting becomes weary, flat, and unprofitable.

Our former selves are never dead. We speak to them, arguing against decisions we know will bring only unhappiness, offering consolation and hope, even though they cannot hear.

he was as good as his word, for he became a teetotaler, a nonsmoker and a vegetarian to boot

The basis for a successful political revolution on which he had always insisted—the support of existing institutions such as the Army, the police, the political group in power—was now crumbling.

My words are like the stars that never change.

I differ with myself then agree, like the rock that was broken and cemented together. I change my opinion.

As he got older, Billy suspected, he would, Dicaprio-like, simply become like an increasingly wizened child.

Death isn't what it used to be

When he had first started at the center, he had liked to think that he was unexpectedly cool-looking for such a job. Now he knew that he surprised no one, that no one expected scientists to look like scientists anymore.

I mean course you want a change, we want a change, but if a change ain't godsdamn coming, then the next thing I wish is that I didn't care.

I don't want to be a simile anymore," I said. "I want to be a metaphor.

It would be absurd, a ridiculous myopia, to hold up October as a simple lens through which to view the struggles of today. But it has been a long century, a long dusk of spite and cruelty, the excrescence and essence of its time. Twilight, even remembered twilight, is better than no light at all. It would be equally absurd to say that there is nothing that we can learn from the revolution. To deny that the sumerki of October can be ours, and that it need not always be followed by night.

William Gibson told only half the story: like the future, the past is also here in the present, and just as unevenly distributed.

Guv," she said to Baron. "What do you know about how to …" She opened and clenched her hands. "How to make big shit go into something little?

The revolutionaries want a new country in a new world, one they cannot see but believe they can build. And they believe that in so doing, the builders will also build themselves anew.

Through streets Cutter had once known now made strange by mortars, with neglected bunting in the colours of factions, with signs proclaiming idiot theories or new churches, new things, new ways of being, split and peeling. The raucousness and vigour were gone from the streets but still sensible in echo, in the buildings themselves: palimpsests of history, epochs, wars, other revolts embedded in their stones.

Stated most simply, New Death is the condition whereby human corpses now lie always on a horizontal vector—no matter the angle of the surface or the substance of the matter below them—and now orient so that their feet are facing all observers, all the time.

Time was doing what time always does, going faster & faster as if downhill.

What d'you know about making big shit little?

There are clear modern-day analogies to ragbags of the sanctimonious who are nebulously anguished at the iniquities of capitalism, but far more so at any thought of fundamental change.

The first couple of times she had come here, she had been sure that he changed overnight, that the shards of physiognomy that made up his whole reorganized when no one was looking. She became frightened of her commission. She wondered hysterically if it was like a task in a moral children's tale, if she was to be punished for some nebulous sin by striving to freeze in time a body in flux, forever too afraid to say anything, starting each day from the beginning all over again.

Whenever any society dies there must be heroes whose fightback is to not change.

His manager taught him that words change with time, by single letters or more, sometimes their whole roots switching—a "y" to an "e" in a name for power, "sun-writing" becomes "light-drawing." The man eventually gave him this whole other tongue, and he revisited and at last learned from those cuttings about immense foreign wars.

Liberation was fucked up.