Quotes About Change

In a vision, Irie has seen a time, a time not far from now, when roots won't matter any more because they can't because they mustn't because they're too long and they're too tortuous and they're just buried too damn deep. She looks forward to it.

It felt to me as if I were on a certain train, heading wherever it was people like me usually went...except now suddenly something was different. I'd been informed that I would be getting off at an unexpected stop, further down the line. I thought of my father, pushed off the train before he'd barely left the station. And of Tracey, so determined to jump off, exactly *because* she'd rather walk than be told what stop was hers or how far she was allowed to go.

Portnoy was not Roth and he was not real, but in him is enshrined a genuine Rothian freedom, created by Roth, once impossible, now fully realized, a freedom which anyone can now easily access. You don't even have to read the book: you are already living in the world that Portnoy touched and changed.

I AM NOT A WAITER. I HAVE BEEN A STUDENT, A SCIENTIST, A SOLDIER, MY WIFE IS CALLED ALSANA, WE LIVE IN EAST LONDON BUT WE WOULD LIKE TO MOVE NORTH. I AM A MUSLIM BUT ALLAH HAS FORSAKEN ME OR I HAVE FORSAKEN ALLAH, I'M NOT SURE. I HAVE A FRIEND—ARCHIE—AND OTHERS. I AM FORTY-NINE BUT WOMEN STILL TURN IN THE STREET. SOMETIMES. (3.81)

What could she know about the waves of time that simply come at a person, one after the other? What could she know about life as the temporary, always partial, survival of that process?

certainly don't write as a public service. But I am aware, at least as a reader, that remarkable acts of art-making—bold, perverse, unbeholden, free—have had the side effect of changing the weather in a country, in a people, at a certain historical moment, and finally in me, conferring freedoms for which I am now very grateful.

can remember thinking, if they can do this to women? Do they have the power to reprogram their mothers? To make their mothers into the kinds of women their younger selves would not even recognize?

Strange inversions proliferate.

I mean, if you want to help old people, you know, well, vote for a different government, don't send them cans of spaghetti.

For the first time in months, she got dressed without attention to anything else except the basic practical covering of her body. She didn't do her hair. No make-up. No contact lenses. No heels. How much time she saved! How much more she would get done in this new life!

My childhood took place in the widening gap.

For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling sea-water to retrieve the salt – something is gained but something is lost. Though

People like us, we can't be nostalgic. We've no home in the past. Nostalgia is a luxury.

How can two people love each other, create children together, cohabitiate, build a life together, and then end up hating each other in the end.

The world is full of people who remain in relationships that they realize they have no business in. Yet, they stay, hoping and praying for change, believing that the other person will eventually appreciate them and recognize their value.

We have to take care of the moment and then move on to the next. We can't worry about what's to come.

She had grown now not to blame any man, honest miner or bloody bandit. She blamed only gold. She doubted its value. She could not see it a blessing. She absolutely knew its driving power to change the souls of men. Could she ever forget that vast ant-hill of toiling diggers and washers, blind and deaf and dumb to all save gold?

And you must forget what you are—were—I mean, and be happy. When you remember that old life you are bitter, and it hurts me.

Men rise on steppin'-stones of their dead selves to higher things!...

The sun lost its heat and wore down to the western horizon, where it changed from white to gold and rested like a huge ball about to roll on its golden shadows down the

I could write a treatise on the sudden transformation of life into archaeology

It is a paradox of human dynamics, of how the progress of new ideas often rests on the survival of old ways.

You are what you are and you are where you are because of what has gone into your mind. You change what you are and you change where you are by changing what goes into your mind.

People always seemed to think that you stopped believing things in a single, lightning-bolt moment, an instantaneous revelation of loss. For her, at least, the process of disenchantment had been achingly slow.