Quotes About Change

Something having been done just about everywhere just about always is no kind of justification for doing it now.

She wrote, I wish I could be a girl again, with a chance to live my life again. I have suffered so much more than I needed to. And the joys I have felt have not always been joyous. I could have lived differently.

The paper, the stapler, the staples, the tape. It makes me sick. Physical things. Forty years of loving someone becomes staples and tape.

People around the world were moving from one place to another. No one was staying.

And here I am, instead of there. I'm sitting in this library, thousands of miles from my life, writing another letter I know I won't be able to send, no matter how hard I try and how much I want to. How did that boy making love behind that shed become this man writing this letter at this table?

I regret how much I believed in the future.

In the end, everyone loses everyone.

Yesterday I wanted to turn inside out.

The sky slowly pulled up its blue dress to reveal night.

AND IF WE ARE TO STRIVE FOR A BETTER FUTURE, MUSTN'T WE BE FAMILIAR AND RECONCILED WITH OUR PAST?

I got tired, I told him. Not worn out, but worn through. Like one of those wives who wakes up one morning and says I can't bake any more bread.

Choosing to eat fewer animal products is probably the most important action an individual can take to reverse global warming—it has a known and significant effect on the environment, and, done collectively, would push the culture and the marketplace with more force than any march.

I have no need for the past, I thought, like a child. I did not consider that the past might have a need for me.

accepting the compromise of the way we have been, the way we are, and the way we will likely be...may we live together in unwavering love and good health, amen.

I'm grateful for anything that reminds me of what's possible in this life. Books can do that. Films can do that. Music can do that. School can do that. It's so easy to allow one day to simply follow into the next, but every once in a while we encounter something that shows us that anything is possible, that dramatic change is possible, that something new can be made, that laughter can be shared.

Changing how we eat will not be enough, on its own, to save the planet, but we cannot save the planet without changing how we eat.

I wish my days could be washed away like the chalk lines of my days.

There are only two reactions to climate change: resignation or resistance. We can submit to death, or we can use the prospect of death to emphasize life.

he enclosed pieces of string that he used to measure out his body--his head, thigh, forearm, finger, neck, everything. He wanted me to sleep with them under my pillow. He said that when he came back, we would remeasure his body against the string as proof that he hadn't changed.

What kind of world would we create if three times a day we activated our compassion and reason as we sat down to eat, if we had the moral imagination and the pragmatic will to change our most fundamental act of consumption?

We can choose to make changes, or we can be subject to other changes--mass migration, disease, armed conflict, a greatly diminished quality of life--but there is no future without change. The luxury of choosing which changes we prefer has an expiration date.

We aren't exactly emptying the oceans; it's more like clear-cutting a forest with thousands of species to create massive fields with one type of soybean.

She would say to him, "But you are no priest." And he would say, "I am today." And she would say, "Today you believe in God?" And he would say, "Today I believe in love.

We cannot keep the kinds of meals we have known and also keep the planet we have known. We must either let some eating habits go or let the planet go. It is that straightforward, that fraught.