Quotes About Change

When there is no crisis, the wise leader or CEO will invent one. Not by crying wolf but by challenging the employees with change.

The future's another country, man... And I still ain't got a passport.

Generally, women can't do this, but men retain the ancient ability to leave a family and a past. They just unhook themselves, like removing a fake beard, and skulk discreetly back into society, changed men. Unrecognizable.

While she was becoming, everyone grew up and became.

Other people's words are so important. And then without warning they stop being important, along with all those words of yours that their words prompted you to write. Much of the excitement of a new novel lies in the repudiation of the one written before. Other people's words are the bridge you use to cross from where you were to wherever you're going.

Overnight everyone has grown up. While she was becoming, everyone grew up and became.

Early in the morning, late in the century, Cricklewood Broadway.

progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and reimagined if it is to survive.

A neutral place. The chances of finding one these days are slim, maybe even slimmer than Archie's pinball trick. The sheer quantity of shit that must be wiped off the slate if we are to start again as new. Race. Land. Ownership. Faith. Theft. Blood. And more blood. And more. And not only must the place be neutral, but the messenger who takes you to the place, and the messenger who sends the messenger. There are no people or places like that left…

And in the past, Archie wondered, was it just that fewer people cheated? Were they more honest, and did they leave their front doors open, did they leave their kids with the neighbors, pay social calls, run up tabs with the butcher? The funny thing about getting old in a country is people always want to hear that from you. They want to hear it really was once a green and pleasant land. They need it.

A minute later, the young Turk and Howard parted on frosty terms, not much warmed by Howard's twenty-pence tip, the only extra change he had in his pocket. It is on journeys like this – where one is so horribly misunderstood – that you find yourself longing for home, that place where you are entirely understood, for better or for worse.

For he is in a past-tense, future-perfect kind of mood.

The golden age of Luncheon Vouchers ended ten years ago. For ten years Mickey had been saying, "The golden age of Luncheon Vouchers is over." And that's what Archie loved about O'Connell's. Everything was remembered, nothing was lost. History was never revised or reinterpreted, adapted or whitewashed. It was as solid and as simple as the encrusted egg on the clock.

The nineties, ecstatic decade!

Four months in the life of a seventeen-year-old is the stuff of swings and roundabouts;... Never again in your life do you possess the capacity for such total personality overhaul.

We were the first generation to have, in our own homes, the means to re- and forward-wind reality: even very small children could press their fingers against those clunky buttons and see what-has-been become what-is or what-will-be.

Thirty years - almost all of them really happy. That's a lifetime, it's incredible. Most people don't get that. But maybe this is just over, you know? Maybe it's over...

I couldn't imagine her leaving this world without ripping its fabric.

The people sometimes demand change. They almost never demand art. As a consequence, art stands in a dubious relation to necessity – and to time itself.

Generally, women can't do this, but men retain the ancient ability to leave a family and a past. They just unhook themselves, like removing a fake beard, and skulk discreetly back into society, changed men. Unrecognizable.

How is it possible to hate something so completely and then suddenly love it so unreasonably?

To look back at all past work induces nausea [...] It's like taking a tour of a cell in which you were once incarcerated.

Porque el divorcio es eso: quitarle cosas que no ya no necesita a una persona a la que ya no quieres.

But I was so much older then," sang Archie mischievously, quoting a ten-year-old Dylan track, arching his head round the door, "I'm younger than that now.