Quotes About Change

It seemed that everywhere you went, people quickly adapted to the way they had to live, and called it Life.

To be anorexic...she thought, amounted to wanting to shed yourself of some of the imperfect mosaic of pieces that made you who you were. She could understand that now for, maybe underneath that desquamated self you would locate a new version.

But now the world, he thought, had taken them. He knew that this could suddenly happen. One day you just woke up, and there was somewhere that you needed to be.

if you hold on, if you force yourself as hard as you can to find some kind of patience in the middle of all your impatience, things can change.

I think that's what the people who change our lives always do. They give us permission to be the person we secretly really long to be but maybe don't feel we're allowed to be.

She used to be really dynamic and exciting and filled with promise, but she's become this ordinary sort of boring person...I always thought it was the saddest and most devastating ending. How you could have these enormous dreams that never get met. How without knowing it you could just make yourself smaller over time. I don't want that to happen to me.

We had a good marriage," he said. "I just thought it would be so much longer." Then he shrugged, and coughed away a sob, this thin man in his sixties with the soft androgynous face that aging seemed to bring, as though all the hormones were finally mixed up in a big coed pot because it just didn't matter anymore.

But of course she liked Isadora less now, because she needed her less and saw her more clearly.

Because as you get older, life sort of eats away at you like battery acid, and all the things you once loved are suddenly harder to find. And when you do find them, you don't have time to enjoy them anymore, you know?

But you never knew what went on inside someone else; how, over time, a thought could become an obsession, and a new shell could form and harden around it.

All of the women in that time and place, Thea had learned, were stuffed into muslin and starched cotton and forced to sit ramrod-straight and plait their hair or pull it back off their faces with fish oil. There were shoes that laced up with a hundred eyelets, and corsets that required a special hook to open. Women were all in it together back then, as opposed to now, when one woman's experience could differ so greatly from another's that you never knew who you were talking to.

Edie was a gorgeous, avant-garde girl back in the day when that could be a full-time occupation, but in marriage she slowly became less wild. To Manny's great disappointment, though, her domestic skills didn't rise to the fore as her sexual and artistic ones receded.

But the loss of possibilities was always undeniably painful.

Our relationship was like one of those YouTube videos of a flower frowning in speeded-up motion. All of the sudden we were in love.

Sometimes you had to let go of your convictions, or at least loosen them far more than you ever thought you would.

Having children had knocked it all into a different arrangement. The minute you had children, you closed ranks. You didn't plan this in advance, but it happened. Families were like individual, discrete, moated island nations.

Everything you do, it'll all feel really slow for a long time. But looking back, much later, it will have seemed like it was fast.

Yeah, you were lucky you got to come here when you did. But what was most exciting about it when you were here was the fact that you were young. That was the best part.

It was too easy. Letting go also meant other things, things people never discussed. There were restrictions; everything always had to be cathartic these days.

Soon, she and the rest of them would be ironic much of the time, unable to answer an innocent question without giving their words a snide little adjustment. Fairly soon after that, the snideness would soften, the irony would be mixed in with seriousness, and the years would shorten and fly.

But later on, having met in childhood can turn out to have been the worst thing, because you and your friends might have nothing to say to each other anymore, except, 'Wasn't it funny that time in tenth grade

It wasn't that Faith had become political in some sort of moment of epiphany; it was more that the world had moved and she had moved too.

This was an era in which sofa beds were frequently opened and unfolded; at this age people were still floating, not entirely landed, still needing places to stay the night sometimes. They were doing what they could, crashing in other places, living extemporaneously. Soon enough, the pace would pick up, the solid matter of life would kick in. Soon enough, sofa beds would stay folded.

We can't be afraid of change, or else we'll miss out on everything.