Quotes About Change

We can never see the sunrise by looking toward the west. Japanese proverb

whatever stream their weeping willow is planted beside. Samuel Dickey Gordon When from my life the old-time joys have vanished,

Magic: it was what happened when the mind met the world, and the mind won for a change.

The danger would be going back, or staying still. The only way out was through. The past was ruins, but the present was still in play.

Never risking anything meant never having or doing or being anything either. Life is risk, it turned out.

We have lived too long. The great days are past.

If my generation is remembered for anything, it will be as the last one that remembers the world before the Internet.

Up through around twenty-five he'd never even thought about his back: it was a balanced, frictionless, self-regulating system. Now it felt like a busted gearbox into which somebody had chucked a handful of sand.

Everyone was pretending to be bored to tears, or maybe they actually were, but Quentin wasn't. He was unexpectedly happy, though he instinctively kept it a secret. In fact he was so fully of joy and relief he could barely breathe. Like a receding glacier the ordeal of the Beast had left behind a changed world, jumbled and scraped and raw, but the earth was finally putting up new green shoots again.

Magic was wild feelings, the kind that escaped out of you and into the world and changed things. There was a lot of skill to it, and a lot of learning, and a lot of work, but that was where the power began: the power to enchant the world.

He had finished his quest, and it had cost him everything and everyone he'd done it for. The equation balanced perfectly: all canceled out. And without his crown, or his throne, or Fillory, or even his friends, he had no idea who he was. But something had changed inside him too. He didn't understand it yet, but he felt it. Somehow, even though he'd lost everything, he felt more like a king now than he ever did when he was one. Not like a toy king. He felt real.

June ripened into July, then burst and withered and dried and became August.

Magic: it was what happened when the mind met the world, and the mind won for a change. There

The past was ruins, but the present was still in play. They would have to tie him down to keep him from going to Ember's Tomb.

The study of magic is not a science, it is not an art, and it is not a religion. Magic is a craft. When we do magic, we do not wish and we do not pray. We rely upon our will and our knowledge and our skill to make a specific change to the world.

A new thought happens and a new plant springs up. A feeling fades away and the plant dies. Some of the more common ones are always in bloom—fear, anger, happiness, love, envy. They're quite unruly, they grow like weeds. Certain basic mathematical ideas never go away either. But others are quite rare. Complex concepts, extreme or subtle emotions. Awe and wonder are harder to find than they once were.

If there's a single lesson that life teaches us, it's that wishing doesn't make it so. Words and thoughts don't change anything. Language and reality are kept strictly apart—reality is tough, unyielding stuff, and it doesn't care what you think or feel or say about it. Or it shouldn't. You deal with it, and you get on with your life.

He'd thought he'd known what his future looked like, but he'd been mistaken. His life would be something else now. He was starting over, only he didn't think he had the strength to start over. He didn't know if he could stand up.

It was a shock to see them go,

But it wasn't going to kill him. It wasn't sexy, but it was real, and that was what mattered now. No more fantasies—that was life after Fillory.

would have to find something else, he thought mazily. Something new. Couldn't stay here anymore. Couldn't go back. Only forward.

He almost felt like he was betraying Julia. But what did he owe her? It's not like she even would have cared. And Professor Sunderland was here. He wanted somebody who was part of his new world. Julia had her chance.

By the time he was thirteen it was all over. Edward's gift evaporated like dew in the harsh dawn of puberty, painlessly and almost overnight, and though afterwards he could clearly remember what it was like to wander through those gleaming mental corridors, the doors to that secret edifice were now firmly closed, the silver key lost, the path overgrown, never to be found again. His ranking plummeted, and his matches became a series of tearful early concessions.

Quentin's scales, he couldn't help but notice in passing, were the shiny metallic blue of a bitchin' muscle car.