Quotes About Change

What was left of the little world he had grown up in, and whose standards had bent and bound him?

His life, for years past, had been mainly a succession of resigned adaptations, and he had learned, before dealing practically with his embarrassments, to extract from most of them a small tribute of amusement. (The Triumph Of The Night)

Age seemed to have come down on him as winter comes on the hills after a storm.

And as he had seen her that day, so she had remained; never quite the same height, yet never below it: generous, faithful, unwearied; but so lacking in imagination, so incapable of growth, that the world of her youth had fallen into pieces and rebuilt itself without her ever being conscious of the change.

Her incapacity to recognize change made her children conceal their views from her as Archer concealed his; there had been, from the first, a joint pretense of sameness, a kind of innocent family hypocrisy, in which father and children had unconsciously collaborated. And she died thinking the world a good place, full of loving and harmonious households like her own.

She had found out that she had given herself to the exclusive and the dowdy when the future belonged to the showy and the promiscuous; that she was in the case of those who have cast in their lot with a fallen cause

a frivolous society can acquire significance through what its frivolity destroys.

After that I suppose we shall have pretty nearly finished rubbing off each other's angles, he reflected; but the worst of it was that May's pressure was already bearing on the very angles whose sharpness he most wanted to keep.

More than half a lifetime divided them, and she had spent the long interval among people he did not know, in a society he but faintly guessed at, in conditions he would never wholly understand.

To me the only death is monotony. I always say to Ellen: Beware of monotony; it's the mother of all the deadly sins.

All these sights, sounds and sensations, so familiar in themselves, so unutterably strange and meaningless in his new relation to them, were confusedly mingled in his brain

The telephone clicked, and Archer, turning from the photographs, unhooked the transmitter at his elbow. How far they were from the days when the legs of the brass-buttoned messenger boy had been New York's only means of quick communication! "Chicago wants you.

But Archer had found himself held fast by habit, by memories, by a sudden startled shrinking from new things. Now, as he reviewed his past, he saw into what a deep rut he had sunk.

seemed like that moment of pause and arrest when the warm fluidity of youth is chilled into its final shape. He

Los más tradicionales le tenían cariño precisamente por ser pequeña e incómoda, lo que alejaba a los nuevos ricos a quienes Nueva York empezaba a temer, aunque, al mismo tiempo, le simpatizaban.

It seems cruel,' she said, 'that after a while nothing matters… any more than these little things, that used to be necessary and important to forgotten people, and now have to be guessed at under a magnifying glass and labeled: 'Use unknown.

After all there was good in the old ways...there was good in the new order too.

It's all stupid and narrow and unjust—but one can't make over society.

Archer looked down with wonder at the familiar spectacle. It surprised him that life should be going on in the old way when his own reactions to it had so completely changed.

Then they had symbolized what she was gaining, now they stood for what she was giving up. That very afternoon they had seemed full of brilliant qualities; now she saw that they were merely dull in a loud way. Under the glitter of their opportunities she saw the poverty of their achievement.

he mused, thinking of his son as the spokesman of the new generation which had swept away all the old landmarks, and with them the sign-posts and the danger-signal.

After all, there was good in the old ways.

Her incapacity to recognise change made her children conceal their views from her as Archer concealed his;

But is has happened, you know. Bear that in mind. Nothing you can do will change it. Time and again, I've found that a good thing to remember.