Change Quotes

It's much easier . . . to be on the verge of something than to actually be it. This would still take time.

~ Markus Zusak

Over the last 25 years, the major popular movements that have had significant impact on the general society and have changed it, that have had a major civilizing effect – the feminist movement, the environmental movement, and so on – these are mostly developments of the ‘70s and ‘80s. Their roots might be in the activism of the ‘60s, but the movements themselves developed and extended later. The same is true of the changes in respect for other cultures, rights of oppressed people, and so on. These are quite significant changes. If you compare the United States now to what it was, say, 35 years ago, the changes are quite dramatic. These are changes in popular consciousness that are quite deeply embedded.

~ Noam Chomsky

History is hereditary only in this way: we, all of us, inherit everything, and then we choose what to cherish, what to disavow, and what do do next, which is why it's worth trying to know where things come from.

~ Jill Lepore

I smile, loving him for changing with me, for going where my Neglect has taken us, for getting the new me.

~ Lisa Genova

You can’t change the past. You can’t even change the future, in the sense that you can only change the present one moment at a time, stubbornly, until the future unwinds itself into the stories of our lives.

~ Larry Wall

1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal,2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it,3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

~ Douglas Adams

The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it. The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature, and not on its growth and development.

~ Oscar Wilde

I took the sleeper out of Glasgow, and as the smelly old train bumped out of Central Station and across the Jamaica Street Bridge, I stared out at the orange halogen streetlamps reflected in the black water of the river Clyde. I gazed at the crumbling Victorian buildings that would soon be sandblasted and renovated into yuppie hutches. I watched the revelers and rascals traverse the shiny wet streets. I thought of the thrill and danger of my youth and the fear and frustration of my adult life thus far. I thought of the failure of my marriage and my failures as a man. I saw all this through my reflection in the nighttime window. Down the tracks I went, hardly aware that I was going further south with every passing second.

~ Craig Ferguson

For once, it seems there’s nothing to worry about…… for the time

~ Nick Abadzis

All I know is that I've wasted all these years looking for something, a sort of trophy I'd get only if I really, really did enough to deserve it. But I don't want it anymore, I want something else now, something warm and sheltering, something I can turn to, regardless of what I do, regardless of who I become. Something that will just be there, always, like tomorrow's sky. That's what I want now, and I think it's what you should want too. But it will be too late soon. We'll become too set to change. If we don't take our chance now, another may never come for either of us.

~ Kazuo Ishiguro

But that's the challenge -- to change the system more than it changes you.

~ Michael Pollan

You swallow hard when you discover that the old coffee shop is now a chain pharmacy, that the place where you first kissed so-and-so is now a discount electronics retailer, that where you bought this very jacket is now rubble behind a blue plywood fence and a future office building. Damage has been done to your city. You say, ''It happened overnight.'' But of course it didn't. Your pizza parlor, his shoeshine stand, her hat store: when they were here, we neglected them. For all you know, the place closed down moments after the last time you walked out the door. (Ten months ago? Six years? Fifteen? You can't remember, can you?) And there have been five stores in that spot before the travel agency. Five different neighborhoods coming and going between then and now, other people's other cities. Or 15, 25, 100 neighborhoods. Thousands of people pass that storefront every day, each one haunting the streets of his or her own New York, not one of them seeing the same thing.

~ Colson Whitehead

The journey itself is going to change you, so you don’t have to worry about memorizing the route we took to accomplish that change.

~ Daniel Quinn

I would miss Colby, but it wasn't going anywhere. All the more reason why I should.

~ Sarah Dessen

The fate of peoples is made like this, two men in small rooms. Forget the coronations, the conclaves of cardinals, the pomp and processions. This is how the world changes: a counter pushed across a table, a pen stroke that alters the force of a phrase, a woman's sigh as she passes and leaves on the air a trail of orange flower or rose water; her hand pulling close the bed curtain, the discreet sigh of flesh against flesh.

~ Hilary Mantel

No marriage stays in the same pattern forever. It is both the best feature of marriage and the worst, that it inevitably changes.

~ Lisa Kleypas

I felt that my views and philosophies had been changed overnight. The philosophies that i had gladly carved in stone, recited and danced upon.

~ Cecelia Ahern

His own life suddenly seemed repellently formal. Whom did he know or what did he know and whom did he love? Sitting on the stump under the burden of his father's death and even the mortality inherent in the dying, wildly colored canopy of leaves, he somehow understood that life was only what one did every day.... Nothing was like anything else, including himself, and everything was changing all of the time. He knew he couldn't perceive the change because he was changing too, along with everything

~ Jim Harrison

What is in the pencil is greater than what is around it. The talents in you are greater than the environment surrounding you. Your potentials will change your environment.

~ Israelmore Ayivor

People can't live with change if there's not a changeless core inside them. The key to the ability to change is a changeless sense of who you are, what you are about and what you value.

~ Stephen R. Covey

You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

As man sows, so shall he reap. In works of fiction, such men are sometimes converted. More often, in real life, they do not change their natures until they are converted into dust.

~ Charles W. Chesnutt

Real change will come when you focus on yourself - not on changing him, Real change comes when you are willing and able to state your claim on what you are and are not willing to live with. Just remember to let him in on it

~ Dory Hollander

You have forced your way into my Hua, Eona. Change me. First, by your power- then, just by who you are.

~ Alison Goodman

Remember me for these days, not the old ones.

~ Mitch Albom

We are, each of us, a multitude. I am not the man I was this morning, nor the man of yesterday. I am a throng of myself queued through time. We are, gentle reader, each a crowd within a crowd.

~ Josiah Bancroft

Usually, when the distractions of daily life deplete our energy, the first thing we eliminate is the thing we eliminate is the thing we need the most: quiet, reflective time. Time to dream, time to contemplate what's working and what's not, so that we can make changes for the better. (January 17)

~ Sarah Ban Breathnach

Whatever he had found, it made him a better person. Maybe that's what love was, finding the person who brings out the best in you and eliminates the worst.

~ Diana Holquist

At heart we are all powerful, beautiful, and capable of changing the world with our bare hands.

~ Dianne Sylvan

In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.

~ Ernst Fischer

Nothing is made, nothing disappears. The same changes, at the same places, never stopping.

~ Dejan Stojanovic

To be a jazz freedom fighter is to attempt to galvanize and energize world-weary people into forms of organization with accountable leadership that promote critical exchange and broad reflection. The interplay of individuality and unity is not one of uniformity and unanimity imposed from above but rather of conflict among diverse groupings that reach a dynamic consensus subject to questioning and criticism. As with a soloist in a jazz quartet, quintet or band, individuality is promoted in order to sustain and increase the creative tension with the group--a tension that yields higher levels of performance to achieve the aim of the collective project.

~ Cornel West

Maybe this was what Aunt Peg meant all along - returning was a weird thing. You can never visit the same place twice. Each time, it's a different story. By the very act of coming back, you wipe our what came before.

~ Maureen Johnson

The real difference between God and human beings, he thought, was that God cannot stand continuance. No sooner has he created a season of a year, or a time of the day, than he wishes for something quite different, and sweeps it all away. No sooner was one a young man, and happy at that, than the nature of things would rush one into marriage, martyrdom or old age. And human beings cleave to the existing state of things. All their lives they are striving to hold the moment fast....Their art itself is nothing but the attempt to catch by all means the one particular moment, one light, the momentary beauty of one woman or one flower, and make it everlasting.

~ Karen Blixen

The study of doctrine and the teaching of doctrine will change behavior more than the study of behavior will change behavior.

~ Boyd K. Packer

If you stick to something doggedly, you are off to a bad start.

~ Karl Lagerfeld

The Earth, time, concepts, love, life, faith justice, evil - they're all fluid and in transition. They don't stay in one form or in one place forever. The whole universe is like some big FedEx box.

~ Haruki Murakami

As you change your point of view, your views bring about a change in you.

~ George Alexiou

Oh hours of childhood,when behind each shape more than the past appearedand what streamed out before us was not the f

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

My mother said I should have a 'change of scenery.' The word scenery made be think of a play. And as we were driving around, it made sense that way. Because no matter how much the scenery changed, we were still on the same stage.

~ David Levithan