Quotes About Change

It was not Hansu that she missed, or even Isak. What she was seeing again in her dreams was her youth, her beginning, and her wishes--so this is how she became a woman.

A snake that sheds its skin is still a snake.

You people work together to make sure nothing ever changes. Sho ga nai. Sho ga nai. That's all I ever hear.

Life is full of things he cannot control so he must adapt.

Life is full of things he cannot control so he must adapt. My boy has to survive.

There was some prettiness in her eyes, but her youth was spent.

Her mother was unrecognizable to her; it would have been easy to say that the illness had changed her, but it wasn't so simple, was it? Illness and dying had revealed her mother's truer thoughts, the ones her mother had been protecting from her.

In literature, I've never been without consolation. Books have found me at every stage of my life, reminding me that if a character could change, so could I.

Her mother had shrunk.

This was her first time in such a place, and she decided she never wanted to stay anywhere else. Yet in her head, Casey envisioned a meter, like a taxi meter—clicking, clicking, clicking speedily ahead.

It was as if a warm room had gotten cooler, but it was still the same room.

It's a filthy world, Solomon. No one is clean. Living makes you dirty. I've met plenty of fancy people from IBJ and the BOJ who are from the best families, and they like to do some sick shit in bed. A lot of them do very bad things in business, but they don't get caught. Most of the ones I've fucked would steal if they had the chance. They're too scared to have any real ambition. Listen, Solomon, nothing will ever change here. Do you see that?

After losing four of his children and his wife to cholera five years ago, Shin found that he could not speak much about loss. Everything a person said sounded glib and foolish...His faith had not wavered, but his temperament had altered seemingly forever. It was as if a warm room had gotten cooler, but it was still the same room.

but its sharp edge had dulled and softened like sea glass.

Korea won't always be divided.

After Isak died, Yoseb had become a different man—sullen, brooding, and uninterested in anything but work.

Yoseb was almost unrecognizable from the boy she had loved from girlhood. He had become this cynical, broken man—something she could never have predicted. So it was only at the restaurant that Kyunghee behaved like herself. Here, she teased Kim like a younger brother and giggled with Sunja while they cooked. Now, even this place would be gone.

Times might have changed, to be sure, but butchery, which required touching dead animals, was still a shameful occupation—the chief reason given as to why the matchmaker had such difficulty arranging an omiai for him—and Tanaka couldn't help but feel a kind of kinship with foreigners

Japan is not fucked because it lost the war or did bad things. Japan is fucked because there is no more war, and in peacetime everyone actually wants to be mediocre and is terrified of being different.

She would have uprooted herself to have seen the world with him, and now she was seeing it without him.

It is possible that characters need to die for the author to make her moral point, for the author himself to regenerate by letting go of an ideal identity, or for the world to recognize the necessity of certain ideas and ideals to die.

You're a young man, and someone should tell you the real truth about this country. Japan is not fucked because it lost the war or did bad things. Japan is fucked because there is no more war, and in peacetime everyone actually wants to be mediocre and is terrified of being different.

There is no half-measure--NO scratching on the surface of the rubbish heap of tradition will bring about Reform, the only method is Absolute Demolition

The past has come apart events are vagueing the future is inexploitable