Quotes About Change

As certain as weather coming from the west, the things people know for sure will change. There is no knowing for a fact. The only dependable things are humility and looking.

Zag when they think you'll zig.

Time didn't age you; memory did.

Trees fall with spectacular crashes. Planting is silent and growth invisible.

The web: yet another total disorientation that becomes status quo without anyone realizing it.

The prose can be brutally beautiful. But the semester starts, you fall in love, get deflowered, watch Kennedy die and the Beatles invade, get high to listen to Coltrane, and discover Heller, Ellison, Ferlighetti, and Bellow -- writing that flows across the page in huge bright swaths that you didn't know English could permit.

Watching the man, hard-of-hearing, hard-of-speech Patty learns that real joy consists of knowing that human wisdom counts less than the shimmer of beeches in a breeze. As certain as weather coming from the west, the things people know for sure will change. There is no knowing for a fact. The only dependable things are humility and looking.

The laws that govern the light from a firefly in my backyard as I write these words tonight also govern the light emitted from an exploding star one billion light-years away. Place changes nothing. Nor does time. One set of fixed rules runs the game, in all times and places. That's as big a truth as we Earthling have discovered, or ever will, in our brief run.

When removed from their kind, individual human beings can change in remarkable ways .

Trees fall with spectacular crashes. But planting is silent and growth is invisible.

She has seen dieback across the West. Aspens are withering. Grazed on by everything with hooves, cut off from rejuvenating fire, whole groves are vanishing. Now she sees a forest, spreading across these mountains since before humans left Africa, giving way to second homes. She sees it in one great glimpse of flashing gold: trees and humans, at war over the land and water and atmosphere. And she can hear, louder than the quaking leaves, which side will lose by winning.

And the goal of the game will be to figure out what the new and desperate world wants from you.

Yes! And what do all good stories do?" There are no takers. Neelay holds up his arms and extends his palms in the oddest gesture. In another moment, leaves will grow from his fingers. Birds will come and nest in them. "They kill you a little. They turn you into something you weren't.

The trees have vanished and the town forgets. But not the land.

A good answer must be reinvented many times, from scratch.

What frightens people most will one day turn to wonder. And then people will do what four billion years have shaped them to do: stop and see just what it is they're seeing.

We are not...wired to see slow, background change, when something bright and colorful is waving in our faces.

If the past is older than the present, then the future must be younger. And we must all go backward with each passing year.

We'd drifted too far to rely on the old boyhood telepathy anymore.

Maybe they're not scared of different. Maybe they're scared of same. If we turn out to be too much like them, who can they be?

All that's left to sell up here is nostalgia, those recent yesterdays when tomorrow seemed the answer to everything a human might ever want.

The loneliness of writing is that you baffle your friends and change the lives of strangers.

But then, everything on Earth was changing him. Every aggressive word from a friend over lunch, every click on his virtual farm, every species he painted, each minute of every online clip, all the stories he read at night and all the ones I told him: there was no "Robin," no one pilgrim in this procession of selves for him ever to remain the same as. The whole kaleidoscopic pageant of them, parading through time and space, was itself a work in progress.

We will not sleep, but will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye. You'll see me again. But you'll never know when. Hear that shifting, ambiguous rhythm, that promise of all things possible, and the ear is on its way to being free.