Quotes About Change

Ten years ago, we would have been writing perfect stories, but people's attention spans have become more limited in these, the last days of literacy.

If someone seems to have changed from one session to another, make sure you haven't changed instead." A warning from his mother, once upon a time, delivered as if she'd upended a box of spy-advice fortune cookies and chosen one at random.

Do you understand? Nothing thrives without being broken. Nothing exists without being dead first.

I doubt you will enjoy it. But that is the price of change. Someone always pays.

Once, it was different. Once, people had homes and parents and went to schools. Cities existed within countries and those countries had leaders. Travel could be for adventure or recreation, not survival. But by the time I was grown up, the wider context was a sick joke. Incredible, how a slip could become a freefall and a freefall could become a hell where we lived on as ghosts in a haunted world.

It was as if a different person put the key in the ignition and drove away from everything that was familiar. There was no going back now. There was no going forward either. He was going in sideways, sort of, and as frightening as that was, there was the thrill...

Grace was joining him at his request, to assist him in staring out at the swamp while they talked about Area X. Because he'd thought a change of setting - leaving the confines of the concrete coffin - might help soften her animosity. Before he realized just how truly hellish and prehistoric the landscape was, and thus now pre-hysterical as well. Look out upon this mosquito orgy, and warm to me, Grace.

I want to be lost," Silvina wrote once. "I want to be so far beyond anything that there is no map, and the compass spins wild. And when I come back, if I come back, you need to know I've changed, and with that change it means I carry 'lost' with me everywhere, even in the heart of the city. That I am lost forever, and that's how we need to be. So the systems can't find us, can't wreck us. So our heads are clear.

Except, later, I understood Ned better—after he was gone. It wasn't just escape, all those mysterious details, that amazing mythical salamander. By telling me the giant salamander could be near where we lived, he was changing the landscape around me. He was changing what we dreaded, what stifled him, into something exciting and positive and new.

The terrible thing, the thought I cannot dislodge after all I have seen, is that I can no longer say with conviction that this is a bad thing. Not when looking at the pristine nature of Area X and then the world beyond, which we have altered so much.

But this—this is always the same task over and over, to explore cryptozoology of a crude sort. All that changes is the type of animal, and the only challenge is whether the jaws on a crocodile can reasonably be expected to fit onto a bear. For example.

Perché, dopo averla rinviata in così tanti modi, credo che la mia trasformazione sarà più radicale del previsto, che potrei diventare davvero qualcosa di simile alla creatura lamentosa. A quel punto vedrò la luna vera?

and in the aftermath he'd taken back his name, asked that she call him Control again rather than John, which she respected. Some animals' shells were vital to their survival. Some animals couldn't live for long without them.

The face that stares back at you from the mirror later in life is so different than when you're young. There's a winnowing away and a shutting down. A sense of something having been taken from you and you don't know exactly what it is, just that it isn't there anymore.

He drove past a couple of communal basketball hoops and some black and Latino kids on bicycles, who stopped and stared until he was gone. School had been out for a couple of weeks.

As I adjusted to the light, the Crawler kept changing at a lightning pace, as if to mock my ability to comprehend it. It was a figure within a series of refracted panes of glass. It was a series of layers in the shape of an archway. It was a great sluglike monster ringed by satellites of even odder creatures. It was a glistening star.

In the end, if you change the enemy enough, if you wear them down, perhaps losing is good enough.

A bird can be a bat. A bat can be a piece of floating plastic bag. Way of the world. To see things as other things.

I mourned the child I had known who was kind and sweet and curious, and yet could not stop killing.

The face that stares back at you from the mirror later in life is so different than when you're young. There's a winnowing away and a shutting down. A sense of something having been taken from you and you don't know exactly what it is, just that it isn't there anymore. What opens up to you instead is experience, is cunning, is foreknowledge. Nothing you sought.

Already his wings were burning up and he felt more like some ponderous moaning creature trapped in the mire.

La vida es como andar en bicicleta. Para mantener el equilibrio, tienes que seguir moviéndote.

As meditation deepens, compulsions, cravings, and fits of emotions begin to lose their power to dictate our behavior. We see clearly that choices are possible: we can say yes, or we can say no. ... All we are is the result of what we have thought. By changing our mode of thinking, we can remake ourselves completely.

The trouble with specialists is that they tend to think in grooves. From time to time something happens to shake them out of that groove.