Quotes About Change

No two things were the same ever. No two stones, mice, drops of water, snowflakes. What did they call it? Nominalism. Perhaps it applied to people, to the same person at different times. There was no same person.

Mankind's lot, Cartwright observed, hadn't changed much, of late. The Classification system, the elaborate Quizzes, hadn't done most people any good. The unks, the unclassified, remained.

My horse … is pregnant. … What do you say to that? ... I say pretty soon you'll have two horses

C'è soltanto una cosa di cui puoi essere sicuro. Quelli che oggi vendono sapone, domani puzzano. Le industrie non sono enti benefici.

You might be able to adjust to this, the fall of our world, the old world.

Anyhow, that's not what I want. I feel restless. As if there's something I should be doing. Something undone. Some kind of work or something uncompleted. You're right, I suppose. It comes of having sat at a desk for years." "You must try to adjust. Realize that it's over. The old life is gone. Dead." "I guess so.

I wish I'd become a plant earlier.

Una legge di sopravvivenza, aveva detto Ragle. Chi rifiutava di rispondere ai nuovi stimoli era destinato a perire. Adattarsi o morire... Nuova versione di una regola senza tempo.

A rolling stone gathers no moss

His face fell by degrees

Believe me, I know a lot about harm's way. It turns sharp left off the road to Shitsville when you're least expecting it.

You have to distinguish between things that seemed odd when they were new but are now quite familiar, such as Ibsen and Wagner, and things that seemed crazy when they were new and seem crazy now, like 'Finnegans Wake' and Picasso.

Everyone should be forcibly transplanted to another continent from their family at the age of three.

If you stand / there long enough the air will thicken / with dusk and dust and exhaust / and finally with / a starless dark. The day will become something / it's never been before, something for / which I have no name.

If peace is to come to earth through change in man's environment, instead of through change in man himself, it will never come. -- Philip Mauro in The Number of Man the Climax of Civilization

All good things pass away.

Men and women are moved by tides much fiercer than you can imagine, and they sweep us all up into the current.

But you cannot change what you are, only what you do.

If you wanted to divert a mighty river into a different course, and all you had was a single pebble, you could do it, as long as you put the pebble in the right place to send the first trickle of water that way instead of this.

The fairy tale is in a perpetual state of becoming and alteration. To keep to one version or one translation alone is to put robin redbreast in a cage.

It might have been a new way for her heart to beat.

But it didn't seem to Lyra that she would ever grow up.

Lyra had to adjust to her new sense of her own story, and that couldn't be done in a day.

You used to be optimistic. You used to think that whatever we did would turn out well. Even after we came back from the north, you used to think that. Now you're cautious, you're anxious… You're pessimistic. She knew he was right, but it wasn't right that he should speak to her accusingly, as if it was something to blame her for. I used to be young, was all she could find to say.