Quotes About Change

Her mother was still more of a presence than an absence in her life. Juliet supposed that one day in the future it would be the other way round, but she doubted that would be an improvement.

Sometimes it takes just one good man

First things were nice, last things not so much so.

How deceptive that could be. One could lose everything in the blink of an eye, the slip of a foot.

Perhaps his son was right. Perhaps the past was no longer the context for the present. Perhaps none of it mattered anymore. Was this how the world would end—not with a bang but a So?

Her past already seemed an antiquated curiosity—a virtual space re-created by the museum of the future.

There was something to be said for dying before you ended up in incontinence pads, watching an endless loop of reruns of Friends.

He noticed that Ursula's ox-eye daisies, wrapped in damp newspaper, were drooping, almost dead. Nothing could be kept, he thought, everything ran through one's fingers like sand or water. Or time. Perhaps nothing should be kept.

Juliet could still remember when Hitler had seemed like a harmless clown. No one was amused now. ("The clowns are the dangerous ones," Perry said.)

It was a woman's job to try and improve a man. It was a man's job to resist improvement. That was the way the world worked, always had, always would.

That was the trouble, of course. You started off liking someone because of who she was and you ended up wanting her to be different

It's never too late,' I said vaguely. A lie, of course, as often, unfortunately, it is much too late.

They were turning into Wallace and Gromit, he could feel it. Soon he'd be calling the dog lad and sharing cheese and crackers with it. There were worse things, he supposed.

Viola hadn't seen Sunny for nearly ten years and in the interim he had turned into a complete human being. ("Perhaps the two things aren't unrelated," Bertie said.)

He never imagined, when his daughter was small and infinitely, eternally lovable, that he would ever develop a combative relationship with her.

bluestocking, Nancy. Married life has quite changed something

God created Man," she repeated. "And then he had a better idea.

What on earth was she doing with her life? Could she just get up and leave?

What had happened to women? Jackson wondered. They made him feel almost prudish. (Obviously not prudish enough to have resisted the dubious charms of one of them.) More and more these days, he had noticed, he felt like a visitor from another planet. Or the past. Sometimes Jackson thought that the past wasn't just another country, it was a lost continent somewhere at the bottom of an unknown ocean.

Life was all just coming and going, wasn't it? And then eventually it was just going.

The home in which you reside it not forever.

What is the deepest loss that you have suffered? If drinking is bitter, change yourself to wine. —from Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29 Rainer Maria Rilke

Those times when I couldn't stand what I was, and I didn't know how I could possibly be something else.

When God says no to your harmless desires, it's time to get another God.