Quotes about Change

Me, it's the heart: that's the part lacking. I used to want one: a dainty cushion of red silk dangling from a blood ribbon, fit for sticking pins in. But I've changed my mind. Hearts hurt. — Margaret Atwood, from "The Tin Woodwoman Gets a Massage ," Dearly: New Poems (Ecco, 2020)

Better never means better for everyone, he says. It always means worse, for some.

You all right? he said again. I didn't love him, I was far away from him, it was as though I was seeing him through a smeared window or glossy paper; he didn't belong here. But he existed, he deserved to be alive. I was wishing I could tell him how to change so he could get there, the place where I was. Yes, I said. I touched him on the arm with my hand. My hand touched his arm. Hand touched arm. Language divides us into fragments, I wanted to be whole.

Inside John, she thinks, is another John, who is much nicer. This other John will emerge like a butterfly from a cocoon, a Jack from a box, a pit from a prune, if the first John is only squeezed enough.

In reduced circumstances you have to believe all kinds of things. I believe in thought transference now, vibrations in the ether, that sort of junk. I never used to.

It is not only the body that travels, Adam One used to say, it is also the Soul. And the end of one journey is the beginning of another.

How young they are, how frisky! I thought. How touchingly innocent! Was I ever like that? I could not remember.

Any forced change of leadership is always followed by a move to crush the opposition. The opposition is led by the educated, so the educated are the first to be eliminated.

The poems that used to entrance me in the days of Miss Violence now struck me as overdone and sickly. Alas, burthen, thine, cometh, aweary —the archaic language of unrequited love. I was irritated with such words, which rendered the unhappy lovers—I could now see—faintly ridiculous, like poor moping Miss Violence herself. Soft-edged, blurry, soggy, like a bun fallen into the water. Nothing you'd want to touch

You must observe the risings of the Sun and the changings of the Moon, because to everything there is a season.

Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death before you knew it.

I watched your snapshot fade for twenty years.