Quotes About Change

There is no route out of the maze. The maze shifts as you move through it, because it is alive.

You have to be with other people, he thought. In order to live at all. I mean before they came here I could stand it... But now it has changed. You can't go back, he thought. You can't go from people to nonpeople. - J.R. Isidore

Emigrate or Degenerate.

The pain, so unexpected and undeserved, had for some reason cleared away the cobwebs. I realized I didn't hate the cabinet door, I hated my life… My house, my family, my backyard, my power mower. Nothing would ever change; nothing new could ever be expected. It had to end, and it did. Now in the dark world where I dwell, ugly things, and surprising things, and sometimes little wondrous things, spill out in me constantly, and I can count on nothing.

The bird is gone, and in what meadow does it now sing?

How can days and happenings and moments so good become so quickly ugly, and for no reason, for no real reason? Just—change. With nothing causing it.

She makes life over, he realized. She controls life, whereas I just sit on my can and let it happen to me.

Everything wears out eventually; nothing is permanent. Change is the one constant of life.

It will end, Childan thought. Someday. The very idea of place. Not governed and governing, but people.

The Public School, he had long ago decided, was neurotic. It wanted a world in which nothing new came about, in which there were no surprises. And that was the world of the compulsive-obsessive neurotic; it was not a healthy world at all.

But change's always harsh on the loser. Nothing new.

It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity.

The termination of a relationship, he said, is not a misunderstanding. It's a reorganization of life.

This is an interval, ein Augenblick. The cosmic process is hurrying on, crushing life back into the granite and methane; the wheel turns for all life. It is all temporary. And

Bob, you know something . . ." Luckman said at last. "I used to be the same age as everyone else." "I think so was I," Arctor said. "I don't know what did it." "Sure, Luckman," Arctor said, "you know what did it to all of us." "Well, let's not talk about it." He continued inhaling noisily, his long face sallow in the dim midday light.

We were great builders, but one day we decided to play a game. We did it voluntarily; were we such good builders that we could build a maze with a way out but which constantly changed so that, despite the way out, in effect there was no way out for us...

I hope I never get in a fix like that, Taubman said. Hating someone I once loved.

he could remember the prewar days, the other times. Franklin D. Roosevelt and the World's Fair; the former better world.

It will end, Childan thought. Someday. The very idea of place. Not governed and governing, but people. And

Palmer Eldritch had gone to Prox a man and returned a god.

I'm sorry, Leon said. I can see you loved your two friends and you miss them, and maybe they're flying around somewhere in the sky, zipping here and there and being spirits and happy. But you and I and three billion other people are not, and until it changes here it won't be enough, Phil; not enough. Despite the supreme heavenly father. He has to do something for us here, and that's the truth. If you believe in the truth--well, Phil, that's the truth. The harsh, unpleasant truth.

Yes, these new young people, of the rising generation, who did not remember the days before the war or even the war itself—they were the hope of the world.

For them, winter had come.

Things happen fast, during the time of transition in a totalitarian society.