Quotes About Change

You can't start with a democracy. You have to work up through stuff like tyranny and monarchy first. That way people are so relieved when they get to democracy that they hang on to it.

And even childhood was no good any more—not the way it was. No worry then but how to find a good stone, not round exactly but flattened and water-shaped, to use in a sling pouch cut from a discarded shoe. Where did all the good stones go, and all simplicity?

Literature is not a game for the cloistered elect. Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it and it has not changed except to become more needed.

I was mean life a wolf. Now i'm mean like a weasel. When you're huntin' somepin you're a hunter, an' you're strong. Can't nobody beat a hunter. But when you get hunted--that's different. Somepin happens to you. You ain't strong; maybe you're fierce, but you ain't strong. I been hunted now for a long time. I ain't no hunter no more.

Even if teen-age children aren't making a sound, it's quieter when they're gone. They put a boiling in the air around them. As they left, the whole house seemed to sigh and settle. No wonder poltergeists infest only houses with adolescent children. The

If something was untrue and you didn't know it, that was error. But if you knew a true thing and changed it to a false thing, both you and it were loathsome.

Woman can change better'n man, Ma said soothingly. Woman got all her life in her arms. Man got it all in his head.

It must be that there are years unlike other years, as different in climate and direction and mood as one day can be from another day. This year of 1960 was a year of change, a year when secret fears come into the open, when discontent stops being dormant and changes gradually to anger. It wasn't only in me or in New Baytown. Presidential nominations would be coming up soon and in the air the discontent was changing to anger and with the excitement anger brings.

And Ma smiled sadly, He is. Tommy's growed way up - way up so I can't get aholt of 'im sometimes.

The sheriffs swore in new deputies and ordered new rifles; and the comfortable people in tight houses felt pity at first and then distaste, and finally hatred for the migrant people.

How can we live without our lives? How will we know it's us without our past? No. Leave it. Burn it.

A writer lives in awe of words, for they can be cruel or kind, and they can change their meanings right in front of you. They pick up flavors and odors like butter in a refrigerator.

I don't know how it will be in the years to come. There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping a future whose face we do not know. Some of these forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves but because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good.

I've lived in a good climate, and it bores the hell out of me. I like weather rather than climate.

The Western States are nervous under the beginning change. Need is the stimulus to concept, concept to action. A half-million people moving over the country; a million more resting, ready to move; ten million more feeling the first nervousness.

The boys were stunned by the size and grandeur of the West End after their background in a one-room country school. The opulence of having a teacher for each grade made a deep impression on them. It seemed wasteful. But as is true of all humans, they were stunned for one day, admiring on the second, and on the third day could not remember very clearly ever having gone to any other school.

Woman can change better'n a man, Ma said soothingly. Woman got all her life in her arms. Man got it all in his head.

In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy,growing heavy for the vintage.

Oh, strawberries don't taste as they used to and the thighs of women have lost their clutch! And

Maybe you'll come to know that every man in every generation is refired.

I printed it once more on my eyes, south, west, and north, and then we hurried away from the permanent and changeless past where my mother is always shooting a wildcat and my father is always burning his name with his love.

Money does not change sickness, only the symptoms.

You come back a changed man. Samuel, you don't change him. He changes you. I can see the look of him in your face." "Have you thought of the two little boys, Liza?" he asked. "I've thought of your

People moving [...] Movin' cause they got to [...] Movin' cause they want sompin better'n what they got. An' that's the on'y way they'll ever git it.