Quotes About Change

Oh, I know you think the corals too young for me. You have not worn them since you left off dotted muslins. You insist upon growing old. I insist upon remaining young.

Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.

This seems impossible to me. It seems biologically impossible to stay the same size, although I must. It seems one must always be either bigger or smaller than they were at some arbitrary point in time to which all things are compared. The panties that are possibly tighter than they were. When? You can't say when. But you are absolutely positive no question that it's true.

When I returned, everything was different. Everything was calm, and I felt very clean. Everything was in order. Everything was as it should be. I had a secret. It was a guilty secret, certainly. But it was MY secret. I had something to hold on to. It was company. It kept me calm. It filled me up and emptied me out.

Somewhere in the back of my brain there exists this certainty: The body is no more than a costume, and can be changed at will. That the changing of bodies, like costumes, would make me into a different character, a character who might, finally, be all right.

I would disappear, only to come home reinvented. I would be unrecognizable upon my fleeting returns. This fantasy was realized, but not quite the way I had intended. In deciding to remake myself, I managed to avoid the fact that I would also, by definition, have to erase what self there was to begin with. I began to wonder, many years later, if total erasure had been my intent all along.

I write constantly, trying to avoid the dull pain of gradual loss, trying not to think about the fact that I am leaving soon.

What a child knows about transformation is very little. What an adult knows, I think, is even less. Because a child at least remembers that transformation is possible.

Step One is, paradoxically, both a crushing end and a beginning.

We are, by our very human nature, limited in what we can know or do or control or change.

For all its God language, the Twelve Step program isn't actually an attempt at religious conversion. Really, it just tries to bring us to a place of new spiritual understanding that allows us to live differently in this world.

So many people came into your life, and they were such a part of the everyday that it was impossible to imagine them gone until, one day, they were.

Now was not the time to be sentimental. As a child, she'd been ridiculously sentimental about loss, about time passing.

No, normalcy is taken for granted until it's gone.

The end of reading development doesn't exist; the unending story of reading moves ever forward, leaving the eye, the tongue, the word, the author for a new place from which the "truth breaks forth, fresh and green," changing the brain and the reader every time.

Whatever our age, we can be changed by the lives of others if we learn to connect the whole of the reading circuit with our moral imagination.

There is neither the time nor the impetus for the nurturing of a quiet eye, much less the memory of its harvests. Behind our screens, at work and at home, we have sutured the temporal segments of our days so as to switch our attention from one task or one source of stimulation to another. We cannot but be changed. And we are—

Marybeth Gasman

Too many people fail to answer opportunity's knock at the door because they have to finish some preconceived plan.

I supposed this is what is meant by 'growing up'...Find out the difference between what one expected one's life would be like and how things really are" -Lady Constance

This memory was both happy and sad: happy because it was so pleasant, and sad because it made Penelope think about how much she missed Swanburne--the girls, the teachers, Miss Mortimer. Or perhaps it was her own much younger self, that pint-sized person whom she could never be again, whom she missed. It was hard to say.

But when the seesaw of good fortune sinks downward for one person, it is very often on its way up for someone else. This little-known law of physics is called the Fulcrum of Fortune, and although most people prefer to think of fortune as a wheel that spins, the fulcrum (that is, seesaw) is a more accurate depiction for most of us, since the worse our own luck becomes, the more likely we are to notice the good fortune of those around us and brood about the injustice of it all.

You're not where you were, and you're not where you're going. You're here, so pay attention!

One home is forsaken in hopes of finding another.