changes Quotes

“If you base your identity on having friends, being accepted, and being popular, you may find yourself compromising your standards or changing them every weekend to accommodate your friends.”

“Small changes can make huge destination differences.”

“‘Most of all,’ he continued, ‘I miss that feeling when you go to sleep at night and when you wake up in the morning. It’s the feeling that everything is all right in the world. You know, that amazing feeling that you’re whole, that you’ve got everything you want, that you aren’t missing anything. Sometimes when I wake up, I get it for just a moment. It lasts a few seconds, but then I remember what happened, and how nothing has been the same since.’”

“Nothing had changed. Everything had changed.”

“How queer everything is to-day! And yesterday things went on just as usual. I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night? Let me think: *was* I the same when I got up this morning?”

“Sometimes a man seems to reverse himself so you would say, ‘he can’t do that. It’s out of character’. Maybe it’s not. It could just be another angle, or it might be that the pressures above or below have changed his shape. You see it in war a lot - a coward turning a hero and a brave man crashing in flames.”

“Nobody changes. Nobody gets hurt.”

“There’s nothing wrong with being different.”

“Somewhere inside all of us is the power to change the world”

“Huddled together in the dining room and waiting for the sun to rise, none of us had any notion that a way of life had ended.”

“But people themselves alter so much, that there is something new to be observed in them for ever.”

″You can always change your plan, but only if you have one. I’m a big believer in to-do lists. It helps us break life into small steps. I once put “get tenure” on my to-do list. That was naïve. The most useful to-do list breaks tasks into small steps. It’s like when I encourage Logan to clean his room by picking up one thing at a time.″

“I change myself, I change the world.”

“Awareness of our situation must come before inner changes, which in turn come before changes in society. Nothing happens in the “real” world unless it first happens in the images in our heads.”

“As far as inner transformation is concerned, there is nothing you can do about it. You cannot transform yourself, and you certainly cannot transform your partner or anybody else. All you can do is create a space for transformation to happen, for grace and love to enter.”

“Wherever you are, be there totally. If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally.”

“It was starting to seem to me that just when I had life all figured out it changed.”

″‘I don’t see what’s so triflic about creating people as people and then gettin’ upset ‘cos they act like people,’ said Adam severely. ‘Anyway, if you stopped tellin’ people it’s all sorted out after they’re dead, they might try sorting it all out while they’re alive.‘”

“At first things were very confusing. Everything was so entirely different from the world I had known – even the flowers.”

“Our chairs, being his patents, embraced and caressed us rather than submitted to be sat upon.”

“Beyond these lifeless sounds the world was silent. Silent? It would be hard to convey the stillness of it. All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives – all that was over.”

“Tears came to his eyes, perhaps from the cold air blowing in through the open doors. His new family was already outside; they turned and looked back at him. Salva blinked away the tears and took his first step into a new life in America.”

“If instead of saying ‘I am in love’ we say ‘I am loving’ or ‘I will love.’ Our patterns around romantic love are unlikely to change if we do not change our language.”

“Humanity had been strong, energetic, and intelligent, and had used all its abundant vitality to alter the conditions under which it lived. And now came the reaction of the altered conditions.”

“Thanks, but I’d rather stay an Eeyore.”

“The whole surface of the earth seemed changed – melting and flowing under my eyes.”

“Move from reason that observes to reason that acts.”

“But to me the future is still black and blank – is a vast ignorance, lit at a few casual places by the memory of his story.”

“They’re happy like that; I’m happy like this. Life has changed completely. At that all her being, even her beauty, became for a moment, dusty and out of date.”

“For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You’ll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, you’ll realize it’s always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won’t understand why or how.”

“I take a good long look at her. I know life well enough to know you can’t count on things staying around or standing still, no matter how much you want them to.”

“I will love you if you cut your hair and I will love you if you cut the hair of others. I will love you if you abandon your baticeering, and I will love you if you retire from the theater to take up some other, less dangerous occupation.”

″‘Tingly,’ he said. His eyes widened. ‘Really tingly!’ His clothes suddenly looked very loose. He looked up at Kendra, craning his neck at his much taller sister...The shrinking accelerated, and he seemed to disappear.”

“Worthless. Stupid. These are the words I grew up hearing. They’re the words I try to outrun, because if I let them in, they might stay there and grow and fill me up and in, until the only thing left of me is worthless stupid worthless stupid worthless stupid freak. And then there’s nothing to do but run harder and fill myself with other words: This time will be different. This time, I will stay awake.”

“Your hope lies in accepting your life as it now lies before you, forever changed. If you can do that, the peace you seek will follow. Forever changed. I am forever changed.”

“The walls are lined with school photos. Finch in kindergarten. Finch in middle school. He looks different every year, not just agewise but personwise. Class-clown Finch. Awkward Finch. Cocky Finch. Jock Finch.”

A storm you are, but a much needed one, to wash away the old and complacent and prune the galaxy of deadweight.

“The reaction didn’t seem to bother her. She stood there in front, her eyes saying, ‘OK, friends, here I am,’ in answer to their open-mouthed stares while Mrs. Myers fluttered about trying to figure where to put the extra desk.”

“But the memory changes you, right? It makes you a different person.”

“Nick loved a girl who doesn’t exist. I was pretending, the way I often did, pretending to have a personality. I can’t help it, it’s what I’ve always done: The way some women change fashion regularly, I change personalities. What persona feels good, what’s coveted, what’s au courant? I think most people do this, they just don’t admit it, or else they settle on one persona because they are too lazy or stupid to pull a switch.”

“With my mother’s death all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life. There was to be much fun, many pleasures, many stabs of Joy; but no more of the old security. It was sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like Atlantis.”

“Over just a few years, the old Amy, the girl of the big laugh and the easy ways, literally shed herself, a pile of skin and soul on the floor, and out stepped this new, brittle, bitter Amy. My wife was no longer my wife, but a razor-wire knot daring me to unloop her.”

“When Mom first announced that her Bosnian war refugee great-aunt was coming to live with us, I’d pictured a skeletal woman in a shawl, deep half-moon shadows beneath haunted eyes.”

“Change isn’t always for the best.”

“A new sense of ‘church’ had emerged, open and inclusive, replacing the hermetically sealed model that had kept the ‘good folks’ in and the ‘bad folks’ out.”

“The years went by, and Mary Alice and I grew up, slower than we wanted to, faster than we realized. Another war came, World War II, and I wanted to get in it. The war looked like my chance to realize my old dream of flying.

“Imagining yourself at your own funeral allows you to look back at your life while you still have the chance to make some important changes.”

“The soft-minded man always fears change. He feels security in the status quo, and he has an almost morbid fear of the new.”

“We changed again, and yet again, and it was now too late and too far to go back, and I went on. And the mists had all solemnly risen now, and the world lay spread before me.”

″‘And if there were a contest, and he had to compete in measuring the shadows with the prisoners who had never moved out of the den, while his sight was still weak, and before his eyes had become steady (and the time which would be needed to acquire this new habit of sight might be very considerable), would he not be ridiculous? Men would say of him that up he went and down he came without his eyes; and that it was better not even to think of ascending; and if any one tried to loose another and lead him up to the light, let them only catch the offender, and they would put him to death.’ ‘No question,’ he said.”

“Restoration. I like the word. The house, the land, perhaps ourselves. But restored to what? Our lives are full. It’s our zeal for all this work that amazes me.”

“It was the kind of thing that showed you that a little guy could still make all the difference, and it reminded you how suddenly events could turn around in this world, for better or for worse.”

“I saw then how I had changed. I did not mind anymore that I lost when we raced and I lost when we swam out to the rocks and I lost when we tossed spears or skipped stones. For who can be ashamed to lose to such beauty?”

“I recognize the desire to surprise your own life. ‘You must change your life,’ as the poet Rilke said.”

“As a man matures he also learns that he may be giving up himself, but his major change is becoming more aware of how he can succeed in giving. Likewise, as a woman matures she also learns new strategies for giving, but her major change tends to be learning to set limits in order to receive what she wants.”

“Being old gave [Sophie] an entirely new view of Fanny. She was a lady who was still young and pretty, and she had found the hat shop as boring as Sophie did. But she had stuck with it and done her best, both with the shop and with the three girls—until Mr. Hatter had died. Then she had suddenly been afraid she was just like Sophie: old with no reason, and nothing to show for it.”

“I like to see people reunited, maybe that’s a silly thing, but what can I say, I like to see people run into each other, I like the kissing and the crying, I like the impatience, the stories that the mouth can’t tell fast enough, the ears that aren’t big enough, the eyes that can’t take in all of the change, I like the hugging, the bringing together, the end of missing someone…”

“Years ago, a wise friend told me that no one ever changes until the pain level gets high enough.”

“The days when you could act out of your noble instincts are over. Except of course, you here in Europe don’t yet seem to know it.”

Sudden shifts and changes are no bad preparation for political life.

“He was much changed and grown even thinner since Pyotr Ivanovich had last seen him, but, as is always the case with the dead, his face was handsomer and above all more dignified than when he was alive.”

“He brought back their snoof and their tringlers and fuzzles, Brought back their pantookas, their dafflers and wuzzles.”

“He rode into Whoville. He brought back their toys. He brought back their floof to the Who girls and boys.”

“Trees and bushes grow over concrete, reclaiming little pockets and corners, but even more have been cleared away. Shattered glass crunches under my feet and clouds of dust drift in the wind, but somehow this place, the picture of neglect, doesn’t feel abandoned. I know this place from the histories, from the books and old maps.”

“They realize at last that change does not mean reform, that change does not mean improvement.”

“Benjamin, once he left the hospital, took life as he found it. Several small boys were brought to see him, and he spent a stiff-jointed afternoon trying to work up an interest in tops and marbles – he even managed, quite accidentally, to break a kitchen window with a stone from a sling shot, a feat which secretly delighted his father . . . Thereafter Benjamin contrived to break something every day, but he did these things only because they were expected of him, and because he was by nature obliging.”

“What we have now makes me happy. And I can live in that happy, and feel safe there, knowing that even if things change, I’ll always have had this.”

“Let us change the tense for convenience.”

“When one parent dies, the world is dramatically altered, absolutely, but you still have another one left. When that second parent dies, it’s the loss of all ties, and where does that leave you? You lose your history, your sense of connection to the past.”

“I just don’t like my world disturbed without some warning.”

“He came. He left. Nothing else had changed. I had not changed. The world hadn’t changed. Yet nothing would be the same. All that remains is dreammaking and strange remembrance.”

“I won’t be a carer any more come the end of the year, and though I’ve got a lot out of it, I have to admit I’ll welcome the chance to rest—to stop and think and remember. I’m sure it’s at least partly to do with that, to do with preparing for the change of pace, that I’ve been getting this urge to order all these old memories.”

“Style, like taste, is resistant to lucid definition; however, both, as living things should be, are subject to constant change.”

“Perceptive individuals the not quite intelligible feeling that something had gone terribly wrong and would never again be right.”

“I wasn’t ready to admit the truth: It wasn’t just the world that changed with the coming of the Others. We changed. I changed.”

“Things changed, people changed, and the world went rolling along right outside the window.”

“What you are determines the world in which you live, so as you change, your world changes also.”

“Here today, up and off to somewhere else tomorrow! Travel, change, interest, excitement! The whole world before you, and a horizon that’s always changing!”

“That was my place. A sleepy little town tucked away in the rangy coast of British Columbia—worlds away from the sunshine state I used to call home.”

“I know Dad’s in there, but is it Dad? I mean, what if they came, changed him, made him bad, promised him something they can’t give but he thinks they can.”

“This was what my seventeen years of life had been reduced to: one duffel bag and a hideous valise. How ironic since I used to be the kind of girl who shopped every week-end and worried about what so and so thought about my outfit or if what’s his face noticed me that day.”

“A more realistic approach would be to accept that a significant trauma often leaves a survivor forever changed, and although there should always be hope, the notion that things will go back to ‘normal’ is misleading.”

“The life I knew and loved was gone, and so was my father. No matter how many words I chose to reject.”

“I turned at the sound of my name. Maxon was jogging down the hall toward me. I felt like I was seeing him for the first time.”

“Eternity was in our lips and in our eyes. ”

“When a hot woman meets a hermit one of them is going to change.”

“But while the adversaries forgot the war to remember things of the past, Úrsula had the gloomy feeling that her son was an intruder. […] He was preserved against imminent old age by a vitality that had something to do with the coldness of his insides. He was taller than when he had left, paler and bonier, and he showed the first symptoms of resistance to nostalgia.”

“Our first impressions are generated by our experiences and our environment, which means that we can change our first impressions - we can alter the way we think-slice - by changing the experiences that comprise those impressions...It requires that you change your life so that you are exposed to minorities on a regular basis and become comfortable with them and familiar with the best of their culture, so that when you want to meet, hire, date, or talk with a member of a minority, you aren’t betrayed by your hesitation and discomfort. Taking rapid cognition seriously - acknowledging the incredible power, for good and ill, that first impressions play in our lives - requires that we take active steps to manage and control those impressions.”

“When my grandparents moved to the United States, their first priority was to save enough money to buy this house . . . To them a house meant much more than shelter; it was a stake in their new country.”

“The desert could not be claimed or owned—it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names before Canterbury existed, long before battles and treaties quilted Europe and the East…. All of us, even those with European homes and children in the distance, wished to remove the clothing of our countries. It was a place of faith. We disappeared into landscape.”

“Don’t ever give up, because little by little you are changing.”

“Do not complain. Make every effort to change things you do not like. If you cannot make a change, change the way you have been thinking. You might find a new solution.”

“Alexander Rostov was neither scientist nor sage; but at the age of sixty-four he was wise enough to know that life does not proceed by leaps and bounds. It unfolds. At any given moment, it is the manifestation of a thousand transitions. Our faculties wax and wane, our experiences accumulate and our opinions evolve--if not glacially, then at least gradually. Such that the events of an average day are as likely to transform who we are as a pinch of pepper is to transform a stew.”

“We both sighed. We were still kids, so we liked everything to stay the same. Now the whole town seemed to be up to something.”

“With every side of every tape, an old memory gets turned upside down. A reputation twists into something I don’t recognize.”

“Do not swear by the moon, for she changes constantly. then your love would also change.”

“It’s never good to sit around and wait for someone or something to change your life.”

“So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more dangerous to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.”

“All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.”

“I’ll never get used to anything. Anybody that does they might as well be dead.”

“I’ll stay till the wind changes.”

“Theresa, I know there’s a part of you that believes you can change someone, but the reality is that you can’t. You can change yourself, and Garrett can change himself, but you can’t do it for him.”

“Are they between you and the sunset? ”

“It’s never the changes we want that change everything.”

“Everywhere we go and move on and change, something’s lost--something’s left behind. You can’t ever quite repeat anything, and I’ve been so yours, here--”

“Every time we say we believe in the Holy Spirit, we mean we believe that there is a living God able and willing to enter human personality and change it.”

“Love can be a tremendous deterrent to destructive behavior; it gives the individual the support she needs to change her life.”

“Very hard ethical questions are involved,” he went on. “You are to be made into a good boy, 6655321. Never again will you have the desire to commit acts of violence or to offend in any way whatsoever against the State’s Peace. I hope you take all that in. I hope you are absolutely clear in your own mind about that.”

“People get stuck, thinking they are one kind of person, but they aren’t . . . The human body essentially recreates itself every six months. Nearly every cell of hair and skin and bone dies and another is directed to its former place. You are not who you were in February.”

“Over the years you will go through seasons in which you have to learn to love a person who you didn’t marry, who is something of a stranger. You will have to make changes that you don’t want to make, and so will your spouse. The journey may eventually take you into a strong, tender, joyful marriage. But it is not because you married the perfectly compatible person. That person doesn’t exist.”

″‘So guess what.’ ‘What?... I don’t know...’ ‘I’m pregnant.‘”

“Used to think...God was only good for helping people...stand what they had to.”

“Walking upright has its downside. The skeleton of our primate ancestors developed . . . to support a creature that walked on all fours and had a relatively small head. Adjusting to an upright position was quite a challenge, especially when the scaffolding had to support an extra-large cranium.”

“Sometimes it seems easier to just keep running in the same familiar circles, rather than facing the fear of jumping and possibly not landing on your feet.”

“To kill out a Negative quality, concentrate upon the Positive Pole of that same quality, and the vibrations will gradually change from Negative to Positive, until finally you will become polarized on the Positive pole instead of the Negative.”

“The journey of the hero is about the courage to seek the depths; the image of creative rebirth; the eternal cycle of change within us; the uncanny discovery that the seeker is the mystery which the seeker seeks to know.”

“He had seen the airplanes flying in the sky he had seen the skies of the future filled with them black with them and now he saw the horror beneath. He saw a world of lovers forever parted of dreams never consummated of plans that never turned into reality.”

“If you know who you are, make the changes you must in order to learn and grow, and then give everything you’ve got to your dreams, you can achieve anything your heart desires.”

“None of us really changes over time. We only become more fully what we are.”

“Tea was indeed ready, waiting on the round table in the sitting room with a bright fire burning in the cogwheel. How familiar the room seemed, and homely, but, suddenly, somehow strange. ”

Duborsarsky’s descriptions of the girls’ surroundings, as well as her subtle details about each one of their personalities, creates very vivid images of each character. However, the characters as a whole seem to fall a bit short, never being fully realized, as only Matilda seems to go through the greatest changes from beginning to end.

“Many of the changes would prove to be permanent. Brian had gained immensely in his ability to observe what was happening and react to it; that would last him all his life. He had become more thoughtful as well, and from that time on he would think slowly about something before speaking.”

“In the graveyard, no one ever changed. The little children Bod had played with when he was small were still children; Fortinbras Bartleby, who had once been his best friend, was not four or five years younger than Bod was, and they had less to talk about each time they saw each other; Thackeray Porringer was Bod’s height and age, and seemed to be in much better temper with him;...”

“I don’t like living in caves. Do neanderthal people wear stone trousers?”

“Maybe love shouldn’t be built on a foundation of compromises, but maybe it can’t exist without them either. Not the kind that forces two people into shapes they don’t fit in, but the kind that loosens their grips, always leaves room to grow. Compromises that say, there will be a you-shaped space in my heart, and if your shape changes, I will adapt. No matter where we go, our love will stretch out to hold us, and that makes me feel like … like everything will be okay.”

“He had changed, and he was tough. I’m tough where it counts—tough in the head.”

“Those baby lips, the pure young heart, a year may work sad change in their words and thoughts!”

“Achieving a goal only changes your life for the moment. We think we need to change our results, but the results are not the problem. What we really need to change are the systems that cause those results.”

“How were you supposed to change- in ways both big and small- when your family was always there to remind you of exactly the person you apparently signed an ironclad contract to be?”

“Cat Chant admired his elder sister Gwendolen. She was a witch. He admired and clung to her. Great changes came about in their lives and left him no one else to cling to.”

“We must put effort and energy into anything we wish to change.”

“She is also looking to move on from her mother’s obsessive search for her missing uncle that has consumed all of August’s life.”

“Anastasia went home. She wanted to tell her parents about her decision to become a Catholic, but she knew that she had to tell them at the right moment, in the right way, because if would be something of a surprise. They might even be a little upset, she suspected, that she was changing her name.”

“A ten-year-old boy adjusts to the changes in his life after his mother dies. Like absently, compulsively poking a sore, the reverberations of a death in the family, significantly a suicide, emerge among cameos of small town and small fry life in Thicket.”

“She was so changed in appearance that Mirrim, passing her table just before the evening meal, almost failed to recognize her. Menolly had been worrying that Mirrim was deliberately avoiding her because Menolly had Impressed nine fire lizards, but there was no restraint in Mirrim’s manner.”

“It was going to be different, having another boy about. There was a spare room for him to sleep in, but Keith would still have a lot of sharing to do.”

“Uncertain as to how it is contracted and passed from one person to another, Mall forces herself to make a sacrifice that radically changes her life--she decides to stops seeing Thomas Torre, a man from another village, the man she hopes to marry.”

“It hardly surprised him that lately he was showing so little consideration for the others; once such consideration had been his greatest pride.”

“Once you’ve hit a ball there’s no point watching to see where it’s going. You can’t change its flight path now. You have to think about your next move. Not what you should have done. What you do now.”

“At twenty years old, Pat hates change as much as ever, and finds in Silver Bush a refuge where she is somewhat shielded from it, but changes happen nevertheless.”

He seeks respite from his troubles in the natural landscape around his Grandma’s house. But it’s like the landscape is also struggling with change and continuity.

“It’s a good time for the Moffats to be storing up memories, because things are changing.”

“He was beginning to enjoy life in New York.”