Quotes About Change

In a new environment, it was possible to transform.

The more you were not with a person, the more your lives diverged.

Those moments of strangeness. Life is full of them.

People rarely spoke of a breakup as tragic; instead, breakups were part of life. But when you and the other person broke up, you could look for them everywhere, and maybe you would physically find them, but even if they were the same person, they were not for you; they were not yours. The evaporation of love was like a kind of death.

He was a little young to go crazy, but it happened to people.

I hadn't known that 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. It's big, and it's always incredibly messy. But there's no way around the mess.

ALL AROUND THE COUNTRY, the women were waking up.

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

It seemed so unlikely, but then again, so did many things in life.

Married life proved not very different from premarried life, except now there was the desire for solidity instead of expansion.

Then it wouldn't be long before they all found themselves shocked and sad to be fully grown into their thicker, finalized adult selves, with almost no chance for reinvention.

But, she knew, you didn't have to marry your soulmate, and you didn't even have to marry an Interesting. You didn't always need to be the dazzler, the firecracker, the one who cracked everyone up, or made everyone want to sleep with you, or be the one who wrote and starred in the play that got the standing ovation. You could cease to be obsessed with the idea of being interesting. Anyway, she knew, the definition could change; it had changed, for her.

all the girls had secretly sprung up in height, even as the teachers and mothers had gotten squashed and lost height and calcium, their bones ground down with an invisible pestle.

What you knew, felt and wanted now, and the way you could love now, had a long valley of seriousness running through it that had always perhaps been there, though to a lesser extent.

Both beds had extra-long sheets, a weird detail of college life. After college, sheets would immediately shorten to their normal length.

In the past," a writer friend of Ethan's had recently said, over lots of beer, "everyone wanted to be novelists. And now they all want to be screenwriters. It's like screenplays are the same exact thing as novels, but easier to read and worth a lot more money.

She had rarely called him honey, and he thought: This is weird. Honey was for a moment of extremeness. She had reached out from their usual vocabulary and into that of some other generation; the words that they usually used wouldn't do. Honey was weird, but it was a bridge across the terrifying open space between where they had been and where they now were. A honeyed bridge that would take them forward as best it could.

But the truth is, you can rarely undo things. This is what you realize after one of your parents dies.

You spend a long time waiting for life to start—the past year or two filled with all these firsts, everything new and terrifying and significant—and then it does start and you realize it isn't what you'd expected, or asked for.

We never know, none of us, what love'll do to us.

never replied to forevers. Life was long, and full of surprises.

So many things you never think you'll do until you do them.

You spend a long time waiting for life to start – her past year or two filled with all these firsts, everything new and terrifying and significant – and then it does start and you realise it isn't what you'd expected, or asked for.

like my own granddad used to say, if you get down to the nub of it, people don't change. That's not true, Katie thought. Not at all. Everyone changed, all the time. That was what was so hard.