Quotes About Change

Something as straightforward as a difference could lead to something as complex as a breakdown.

In the library I felt better, words you could trust and look at until you understood them, they couldn't change halfway through a sentence like people, so it was easier to spot a lie.

How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps but on the whole just so, and them without warning you find the solid floor is a trapdoor and you are now in another place whose geography is uncertain and whose customs are strange?

Every second the Universe divides into possibilities and most of those possibilities never happen. It is not a uni-verse — there is more than one reading. The story won't stop, can't stop, it goes on telling itself, waiting for an intervention that changes what will happen next. Love is an intervention.

History is a hammock for swinging and a game for playing.

What worries me is that a load of shite has been talked about digitisation as being the new Gutenberg, but the fact is that Gutenberg led to books being put in shelves, and digitisation is taking books off shelves. If you start taking books off shelves then you are only going to find what you are looking for, which does not help those who do not know what they are looking for.

Time is a player. Time is part of today, not simply a measure of its passing.

There is always a city. There is always a civilization. There is always a barbarian with a pickaxe. Sometimes you are the city, sometimes you are the civilization, but to become that city, that civilization, you once took a pickaxe and destroyed what you hated, and what you hated is what you did not understand.

The past is a grenade that explodes when thrown.

Time is not constant and one minute is not the same length as another.

Energy cannot be lost, only transformed; where do the words go?

The end of every game is an anti-climax. What you thought you would feel you don't feel, what you thought was so important isn't any more. It's the game that's exciting.

I thought I might become someone else in time, grafted on to something better and stronger. And then I saw that the running away was a running towards. An effort to catch up with my fleet-footed self, living another life in a different way.

I read that the body remakes itself every seven years. Every cell. Even the bones rebuild themselves like coral. Why then do we remember what should be long gone? What's the point of every scar and humiliation? What is the point of remembering the good times when they are gone? I love you. I miss you. You are dead.

It seems to me that being the right size for your world-- and knowing that both you and your world are not by any means fixed dimensions-- is a valuable clue to learning how to live.

And our madness-measure is always changing. Probably we are less tolerant of madness now than at any period in history. There is no place for it. Crucially, there is no time for it. Going mad takes time. Getting sane takes time.

Round and round he walked, and so learned a very valuable thing: that no emotion is the final one.

Love me Sophia, in my foolishness, love my words and not my mortal remains. be tidal to me in the constancy of change. Break over me where I feel most safe, be a shore to me, when I fear I am a wave in the water, endlessly slipping away. Lift me up like a shell from the beach, now empty, now full. Lift me up and there are still songs.

Perhaps it is true that the world is made new again every day but our minds are not. The clamp that holds me will not let me go.

I thought about the dog and was suddenly very sad; sad for her death, for my death, for all the inevitable dying that comes with change. There's no choice that doesn't mean a loss.

You can change everything about yourself - your name, your home, your skin color, your gender, even your parents, your private history - but you can't change the time you were born in, or what it is you will have to live through.

It takes so little time to change a lifetime and it takes a lifetime to understand the change.

You are young, said my father. You won't get any younger even if you clean your teeth twice a day. You'll get older, said my mother, that's what happens. Then what happens? You won't be able to find the treasure. Will I be too old to look for it? No, but you'll be looking in the wrong place.

We were all nomads once, and crossed the deserts and the seas on tracks that could not be detected, but were clear to those who knew the way. Since settling down and rooting like trees, but without the ability to make use of the wind to scatter our seed, we have found only infection and discontent.