Quotes About Change

O mais importante e bonito, do mundo, é isto: que as pessoas não estão sempre iguais, ainda não foram terminadas – mas que elas vão sempre mudando. (...) Natureza da gente não cabe em nenhuma certeza.

A gente quer passar um rio a nado, e passa; mas vai dar na outra banda é num ponto muito mais embaixo, bem diverso do em que primeiro se pensou. Viver nem não é muito perigoso?

O correr da vida embrulha tudo, a vida é assim: esquenta e esfria, aperta e daí afrouxa, sossega e depois desinquieta. O que ela quer da gente é coragem

Tudo o que já foi, é o começo do que vai vir, toda a hora a gente está num cômpito.

acho que o sentir da gente volteia, mas em certos modos, rodando em si mas por regras. O prazer muito vira medo, o medo vai vira ódio, o ódio vira esses desesperos? — desespero é bom que vire a maior tristeza, constante então para o um amor — quanta saudade... —; aí, outra esperança já vem...

quando é que a velhice começa, surgindo de dentro da mocidade.

A única esperança que nos resta é que estas contradições sejam uma questão de gerações. No futuro haveremos de parecer bem ridículos.

Queen Anne's War ended disastrously for France, causing her to lose all of her colonies in America and nearly all in India. Her loss of Canada made the Louisiana colonists fear that there would soon be a change in domination. Indeed, on November 13, 1762, the king of Spain, Charles III, accepted by the secret Treaty of Fontainebleau the gift of Louisiana from his cousin, Louis XV, the king of France.

It is easy to see the beginning of things, and harder to see the ends. I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my finger upon the moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact plane on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was

Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

You have your wonderful memories, people said later, as if memories were solace. Memories are not. Memories are by definition of times past, things gone. Memories are the Westlake uniforms in the closet, the faded and cracked photographs, the invitations to the weddings of the people who are no longer married, the mass cards from the funerals of the people whose faces you no longer remember. Memories are what you no longer want to remember.

There was a level on which I believed that what had happened remained reversible

In fact I no longer value this kind of memento. I no longer want reminders of what was, what got broken, what got lost, what got wasted. There was a period, a long period, dating from my childhood until quite recently, when I thought I did. A period during which I believed that I could keep people fully present, keep them with me, by preserving their mementos, their things, their totems.

The fear is for what is still to be lost.

from On Keeping a Notebook]: It is a good idea to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about…I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not…Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.

It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.

Leis go brown, tectonic plates shift, deep currents move, islands vanish, rooms get forgotten.

The past could be jettisoned . . . but seeds got carried.

There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.

I try to live in the now and keep my eye on the hummingbird. I see no one I used to know, but then I'm not just crazy about a lot of people. I mean maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the game?

In was raised to believe that what came in on the next roll would always be better than what went out on the last. I no longer believe that, but I am telling you how it was.

When we lose that sense of the possible we lose it fast. One day we are absorbed by dressing well, following the news, keeping up, coping, what we might call staying alive; the next day we are not.

Time passes. Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.

Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. The question of self-pity.