Quotes About Change

Time is the school in which we learn, / Time is the fire in which we burn: Delmore Schwartz again.

We closed the deal and moved to New York. Where in fact I had lived before, from the time I was twenty-one and just out of the English Department at Berkeley and starting work at Vogue (a segue so profoundly unnatural that when I was asked by the Condé Nast personnel department to name the languages in which I was fluent I could think only of Middle English) until I was twenty-nine and just married.

This happened on December 30, 2003. That may seem a while ago but it won't when it happens to you. And it will happen to you. The details will be different, but it will happen to you. That's what I'm here to tell you.

The time warp: the Civil War was yesterday, but 1960 is spoken of as if it were about three hundred years ago.

The devastation along the Gulf had an inevitability about it: the coast was reverting to its natural state.

Later those few minutes in the plaza in Oxnard would come back to Maria and she would replay them, change the scenario. It ended that way badly, or well, depending on what you wanted.

La vie change vite. La vie change dans l'instant. On s'apprête à dîner et la vie telle qu'on la connaît s'arrête.

Nous ne sommes pas des bêtes idéalisées. Nous sommes d'imparfaits mortels, conscients de cette mortalité alors même que nous la rejetons, trahis par notre propre complexité, ainsi faits que lorsque nous pleurons nos pertes, c'est aussi, pour le meilleur et pour le pire, nous-mêmes que nous pleurons. Tels que nous étions. Tels que nous ne sommes plus. Tels qu'un jour nous ne serons plus du tout.

wrote, "despite our preparation, indeed, despite our age, dislodges things deep in us, sets off reactions that surprise us and that may cut free memories and feelings that we had thought gone to ground long ago.

Through most of my life I would have interpreted the growth of the prison system and the diminution of the commitment to public education as evidence of how California had changed. Only recently have I come to see them as quite the opposite, evidence of how California had not changed, and to understand change itself as one of the culture's most enduring misunderstandings about itself.

The death of a parent, he wrote, "despite our preparation, indeed, despite our age, dislodges things deep in us, sets off reactions that surprise us and that may cut free memories and feelings

Water under the bridge and dynamite it behind you.

Why did I think that this improvisation could never end? If I had seen that it could, what would I have done differently? What would he?

the only safe place for me to be, the place where everything would be the same, the place where no one would know about or refer to the events of my recent life; the place where I would still be the person I had been before any of this happened.

Margaret, are you grieving Over Goldengrove unleaving? . . . It is the blight man was born for, It is Margaret you mourn for.

a vida muda rapidamente. a vida muda em um instante. você se senta para jantar, e a vida que você conhecia termina. a questão da autopiedade.

or amended and saved at 1:08 p.m. that afternoon

Yet the Beverly Wilshire seemed when Quintana was at UCLA the only safe place for me to be, the place where everything would be the same, the place where no one would know about or refer to the events of my recent life; the place where I would still be the person I had been before any of this happened.

I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome.

All that is constant about the California of my childhood is the rate at which it disappears.

You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

Manau der?t? bent jau linktel?ti žmon?ms, kuriais kadaise buvome,- ir nesvarbu, maloni mums j? draugija ar ne.

I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be.

The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion real live here in only the most temporary way.