Quotes About Change

Our only hope has always been that the hate-filled old white guys die off and young people are more progressive.

What you are pursuing is meaning -- a meaningful life. There's the hap -- the fate, the draw that is yours, and it isn't fixed, but changing the course of the stream, or dealing new cards, whichever metaphor you want to use -- that's going to take a lot of energy. There are times when it will go so wrong that you will barely be alive, and times when you realize that being barely alive, on your own terms, is better than living a bloated half-life on someone else's terms.

The future is intact, still unredeemed, but the past is irredeemable. She is not who she thought she was.

Our memories change as we do.

He had never talked of what he wanted to do, where he was going, he never joined in the aimless conversations that clustered round the idea of something better in another time. He didn't believe in the future, only the present, and as our future, our years, had turned so relentlessly into identical presents, I understood him more.

We get somewhere we couldn't go otherwise and we profit from the trip, but we can't stay there, it isn't our world, and we shouldn't let that world come crashing down into the one we can inhabit.

That night, I knew I would get away, better myself. Not because I despised who I was, but because I did not know who I was. I was waiting to be invented. I was waiting to invent myself.

HE: History has no smell. ME: Is that why we are nostalgic for it? HE: Breathe in, breathe out. The past doesn't stink like the present.

But the rags and the ribbons turn to years and then the years are gone.

Time is a great deadener. People forget, get bored, grow old, go away.

So the past, because it is the past, is only malleable where once it was flexible.

This is the city of disguises. What you are one day will not constrain you on the next. You may explore yourself freely and, if you have wit or wealth, no one will stand in your way. This city was built on wit and wealth and we have a fondness for both, though they do not have to appear in tandem.

The wind blew and it didn't seem important, but tomorrow when the wind blew, it would be important. All the familiar things were getting different meanings.

It is not possible to control the outside of yourself until you have mastered your breathing space. It is not possible to change anything until you understand the substance you wish to change. Of course people mutilate and modify, but these are fallen powers, and to change something you do not understand is the true nature of evil.

London is perpetual; a constant streaming present hurrying towards a receding future.

The future id foretold from the past and the future is only possible because of the past. Without past and future, the present is partial.

Spring is about beginning again, and beginning again can be so much harder than staying in the winter of your life. What do you need to do this spring? What needs to begin again? What ground needs to be prepared? What needs to be planted? What needs to be swept away, because it's done? What new life is here? What will be different, this time?

When I was born, I became the visible corner of a folded map. The map has more than one route. More than one destination. The map that is the unfolding self is not exactly leading anywhere. The arrow that says YOU ARE HERE is your first first coordinate. There is a lot you can't change when you are kid. But you can pack for the journey.

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

This has been my difficulty. The difficulty with my life. Those well-built trig points, those physical determinants of parents, background, school, family, birth, marriage, death, love, work, are themselves as much in motion as I am. What should be stable, shifts. What I am told is solid, slips. The sensible strong ordinary world of fixity is folklore. The earth is not flat. Geometry cedes to algebra. The Greeks were wrong.

Everything is in constant flux on this earth. Nothing keeps the same unchanging shape, and our affections, being attached to things outside us, necessarily change and pass away as they do. Always out ahead of us or lagging behind, they recall a past which is gone or anticipate a future which may never come into being; there is nothing solid there for the heart to attach itself to. Thus our earthly joys are almost without exception the creatures of a moment...

So long as one remains in the same condition, the inclinations which result from habit and are the least natural to us can be kept; but as soon as the situation changes, habit ceases and the natural returns. Education is certainly only habit. Now are there not people who forget and lose their education? Others who keep it? Where does this difference come from? If the name nature were limited to habits conformable to nature, we would spare ourselves this garble!

an animal, at the end of a few months, is what it will be all its life; and its species, at the end of a thousand years, is what it was in the first of those thousand years. Why is man alone subject to becoming an imbecile?

I hear from afar the shouts of that false wisdom which is ever dragging us onwards, counting the present as nothing, and pursuing without pause a future which flies as we pursue, that false wisdom which removes us from our place and never brings us to any other.